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From: Jung-uk Kim <jkim@FreeBSD.org>
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Subject: Re: 8.0-BETA2 not getting my 4Gigs of ram
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On Friday 14 August 2009 05:31 am, Kostik Belousov wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 09:42:14AM +0200, Mark Stapper wrote:
> > Claus Guttesen wrote:
> > >> BIOS reports (around) 4GiB
> > >> Gentoo reports appr. 2.9GiB
> > >> *cough* Windows *cough* reports 4GiB
> > >> I'll get on the dmesg once I get home.
> > >> Greetz,
> > >> Mark
> > >
> > > You might want to try to download an image from memtest.org.
> >
> > I actually made a typo...
> > Gentoo reports 3.9GiB (bad type I know)
> > My memory is fine. It's been running very, very stable for over 2
> > years. I've been searching the net, and I think Kostik is right,
> > it's just a "cosmetic" info message in early boot, but still,
> > sloppy... So I will do the verbose boot and post dmesg here. I do
> > think it is strange that it states that I have the exact amount
> > of 2 Gibibyte of "real memory" in dmesg.
> > Could it be a limitation of my motherboard driver?
> > I can't imagine it's like this on all amd64 systems... Someone
> > might have said something right?
> > In any way I'll post the verbose boot logging here
> > tonight/tomorrow when I get home from work.
> > greetz,
> > Mark
>
> The "real memory" line is what smbios parser parsed. Value reported
> on the "available memory" line is the actual amount of memory
> kernel detected and is going to use. "Real memory" value is used
> only to display that "real memory" line.
>
> I do agree that the printout is very confusing, and I suspect that
> our smbios parser has a bug. Contact jkim@, who is the author of
> r190599, that introduced this behaviour.

So far I got few similar reports but all issues were BIOS bugs, not my 
code.  Except for one ancient board, there were BIOS updates to fix 
the problem.

Jung-uk Kim