Under the Memory section, there is an option called "Adjust Memory" that is
disabled by default ( I think :). Setting it to "Auto" makes the BIOS
adjust the memory so that the drivers will be loaded above the 4GB
boundary, and the system will see all of the memory (I went from 15.5 GB to
16 GB after setting this option ). I haven't run with this long enough to
know if any of the problems that Mark alluded to will show up or not
though...
On the Tyan S2885 with the v2.02 BIOS, the discrete vs. continuous options
for MTRR apply to the way that the BIOS maps the memory values, and will
have an effect on whether the Nvidia driver will work with the card - AGP
(discrete mapping) or just PCI (continuous mapping - with bandwidth
limiting the OpenGL performance to about 10 to 15 percent of what it should
be ). If you have it set to continuous (the default - I didn't know it had
been added for a while, until Mark called it to my attention :) you will
see messages in /var/log/messages when the Nvidia driver is loaded about
the mtrr values being the wrong type (write-back vs. combining, or
something like that - I am not at work now, so can't give the exact message
:), and the card will be driven using just PCI. Changing the value to
discrete clears this up, and the card will work with AGP.
Kevin Gassiot
Advanced Systems Group
Visualization Systems Support
Veritas DGC
10300 Town Park Dr.
Houston, Texas 77072
832-351-8978
kevin_gassiot@veritasdgc.com
Ken Siersma
Ken Siersma wrote:
What is the chipset of your motherboard? I have a Asus A8V with a Via chipset that states that "with 4 GB of RAM the memory available will be a little less than 4GB due to the Southbridge resource allocation".
Alex
It is a Tyan S2885 Thunder K8W board - chipset AMD-8151.
If you don't have it already, get V2.02 of the tyan bios. There's an option in there that helps quite a bit. I have 8GB of ram and Suse sees virtually all of it. If I don't enable this option then it only sees about 7GB, so it makes a huge difference.
I can't remember the name of the option. But I think it should be set to 'discreet' if I remember correctly. I think its under the memory configuration section.
Mark
Mark, Thanks. Changing the option that I think you are referring to (CPU Configuration: MTRR Mapping: Discrete) did not work for me. I still only see 3.26 GB. -- Check the List-Unsubscribe header to unsubscribe For additional commands, email: suse-amd64-help@suse.com