Mike Larkin wrote:
After being away from OpenBSD for about 2 years, I recently decided to take another look at it for a server I am deploying. The machine is a 8-way amd64 (Intel quad Xeon x 2) with 16GB ram. The BIOS and bootloader correctly see all 16gb, but the kernel only sees 4.00GB (a very non-random amount, indicating to me an artificial limit is being imposed somewhere). Just for comparison purposes, amd64 Windows and amd64 Linux also both see 16gb, but these are not being considered for deployment.

I've tried both 4.2 and -current from a week or so back, and have the same problem on both. I also went through the -GENERIC config and GENERIC-MP config and tried to see if any options in there were applicable, but did not see anything that seemed appropriate to fix this issue.

A few notes:
1. I am using the amd64 platform release, not i386 (in case someone thought I was trying to do some PAE-related stuff). I verified that it really is the amd64 kernel and not a rogue i386 one that slipped in there accidentally (which would explain the 4GB limit without PAE). 2. Both GENERIC and -MP only see 4gb, but -MP _does_ correctly see all 8 cores. 3. I checked the archive and noticed that some people have had no issues with similar configurations, so I'm probably doing something wrong or I might be missing a config option. (Most of these success stories are using Sun hardware - the machine in question is not, but I'm not sure why the system would be picky in that respect). 4. The memory ranges reported by the bootloader are correct - typical mappings up to 4gb, followed by a large 12.8GB range starting at physical 5GB. All the ranges are enabled.
5. It's a Dell server, in case that matters to anyone.

Any thoughts or specific reason why I _should not_ expect this configuration to work (with all 16gb usable) ?

-ml
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Hi,

the following Undeadly comments might shed some light on your issue:

http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20060123062745&pid=5&mode=expanded

and

http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20071007002942&pid=6&mode=expanded

HTH

Fred
--
http://www.crowsons.com/puters/x41.htm

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