On 2011-08-18 21.16, Dave Anderson wrote:
> I've been looking at a bunch of notebook dmesgs (i386, single processor)
> recently and have noticed that the value reported for 'real mem' is
> almost always much lower than the amount of memory actually installed.
> A typical example is
> OpenBSD 5.0 (GENERIC) #39: Mon Aug 8 14:53:43 MDT 2011
> [email protected]:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC
> real mem = 2900148224 (2765MB)
> spdmem0 at iic0 addr 0x50: 4GB DDR3 SDRAM PC3-10600 SO-DIMM
> spdmem1 at iic0 addr 0x52: 2GB DDR3 SDRAM PC3-10600 SO-DIMM
>
> I understand that i386 cannot see more than 4GB due to architecture
> restrictions, but even allowing for that well over a gigabyte has
> vanished here.
> A quick look at the code that generates this number shows that it's
> skipping various areas reserved by the BIOS, etc., but the total amount
> being skipped seems absurd.
>
> Is there really supposed to be this much reserved space, or is something
> wrong?
The most likely culprit is your graphics adapter. Nowadays video memory
of 512 MB - 1GB seems to be more norm than exception, and it has to co-
exist with the processor's memory in the 32 bit addressable space.
Use amd64 instead and you'll likely get all your memory back, and since
you seem to be running a recent snapshot you'll have no 4GB barrier to
cope with either.
/B
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