On Thu, 18 Aug 2011, 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
> dera...@i386.openbsd.org:/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?
Thanks to all who've replied. It seems kind of disgusting that a modern
video card can grab 1/4 of the available physical address space on i386,
but I suppose that pretty much everyone with such a card is running
amd64 instead.
I've been testing with i386 since the hardware I have at home is all old
enough that I can't use it to install amd64, but I'll get around that
somehow (possibly by using one of the demo machines I'm testing to
install amd64 to my test USB stick) and start testing with amd64/mp
instead.
Dave
--
Dave Anderson
<d...@daveanderson.com>
