Sloan wrote:
Andrei Verovski (aka MacGuru) wrote:
Hi !
I have PC box with Core 2 Quad, P35 chipset and 4 GB of RAM (2+2 GB) with 32-bit OpenSuSE 10.3 and kernel-default installed. The most strangest part is that when I open BIOS everything is OK - it shows 4 GB of RAM. However, in Linux with stock "kernel-default" I see only 3.5 GB ! I suppose I do not need to install kernel-bigsmp or switch to 64-bit version of SuSE just to be able to use ALL 4 GB.
Here is a 32-bit suse machine with 4 GB - looks like you may want the bigsmp kernel
root@freeside:~> free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 4082748 3747028 335720 0 82816 3007352 -/+ buffers/cache: 656860 3425888 Swap: 4198296 8 4198288 root@freeside:~> uname -a Linux freeside 2.6.5-7.267-bigsmp #1 SMP Wed Jun 21 10:50:51 UTC 2006 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux root@freeside:~>
Joe
Here is another 32-bit suse machine with 4 GB and the bigsmp kernel: 08:46 providence~> free -tm total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3041 2103 938 0 502 1059 -/+ buffers/cache: 541 2500 Swap: 1027 0 1027 Total: 4069 2103 1965 The way it was explained to me is: (from Jeff Mahoney) "Some chipsets don't actually allow access to the full 4 GB. This might be one of them." and (from Philipp Thomas) "Sorry, but it has nothing to do with the physical address space per se. What *does* matter is the PCI bus, more precisely the 32 bit PCI devices. These need addresses below 4 GiB for I/O because that's the limit you can address with 32 bit. PC BIOSes typically reserve 500 MiB or 1GiB for such devices, which results in that many RAM being unavailable (anybody remember the gap between 640 KiB and 1 MiB on the PC that was reserved for BASIC ROM, VIDEO BIOS and the BIOS?). Now some systems offer an option that makes this 'hidden' memory available at addresses *beyond* the 4 GiB threshold. To access this memory you either need a PAE enabled kernel (i.e. a kernel that can handle the diffrent addressing with AFAIR 36 bit) or, on machines supporting x86-64 (aka AMD64/EM64T), a 64 bit kernel." So bottom line, I still have a missing gig. -- David C. Rankin, J.D., P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org