On 01/15/2013 05:47 PM, Alex Villacís Lasso wrote:
The system boots, apparently normally, and I can see the additional
"memory" in all system reports. However, I cannot quite shake the
feeling that this "memory" might be in fact an illusion, and an attempt
to use it will wrap around to the bottom of the memory and corrupt
anything there. Or worse.
Some tests that I have tried:
1) I have tried to occupy as much memory as possible, by starting two
virtual machines, plus one instance of eclipse, a browser, and a
bittorrent client, while running the graphical desktop. I have seen the
free memory (as reported by "top") fall to under 200 Mb with no apparent
instability, so this should prove that the extra memory is real, right?
2) I have recompiled the kernel to support the memtest parameter. When
using it, the extra memory segment appears to be as healthy as other
areas of memory. However this might only mean that it is wrapping into
healthy low RAM.
Is my reasoning sane? Is there a way to know, once and for all, whether
the extra "memory" is real and safe to use or not?
Maybe you can get memtest86+ to test this phantom memory? But yes, it
does sound like a BIOS bug.
-hpa
--
H. Peter Anvin, Intel Open Source Technology Center
I work for Intel. I don't speak on their behalf.
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