Re: HELP! Memory issue

From: Duane Wessels (wessels@measurement-factory.com)
Date: Mon Aug 21 2000 - 11:08:56 MDT


On Sun, 20 Aug 2000, Eli Shauriki wrote:

> This is not pure polygraph question, but I need your experience to help me
> out here.
>
> I'm installing FreeBSD 3.4 on Dell OptiPlex GX110 desktop machines. All
> setup procedure is good but one problem - the system doesn't recognize more
> then 65MB of RAM!
> BIOS and NT OK with the 256MB./ FreeBSD is not.
> I have installed the system on different hardware (IBM, Gateway) and they
> recognize the real memory amount (128MB and 256MB).
>
> Can anyone help me with this?

Maybe this will help:

Q: I have 128 MB of RAM but the system only uses 64 MB.

A: Due to the manner in which FreeBSD gets the memory size from
   the BIOS, it can only detect 16 bits worth of Kbytes in size (65535
   Kbytes = 64MB) (or less... some BIOSes peg the memory size to
   16M). If you have more than 64MB, FreeBSD will attempt to detect
   it; however, the attempt may fail.

   To work around this problem, you need to use the kernel option
   specified below. There is a way to get complete memory information
   from the BIOS, but we don't have room in the bootblocks to do
   it. Someday when lack of room in the bootblocks is fixed, we'll
   use the extended BIOS functions to get the full memory
   information...but for now we're stuck with the kernel option.

   options "MAXMEM=n"

   Where n is your memory in Kilobytes. For a 128 MB machine, you'd
   want to use 131072.

Duane W.



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