From owner-freebsd-bugs Wed Mar 13 14:00:47 1996 Return-Path: owner-bugs Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id OAA28936 for bugs-outgoing; Wed, 13 Mar 1996 14:00:47 -0800 (PST) Received: from ibp.ibp.fr (ibp.ibp.fr [132.227.60.30]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with ESMTP id OAA28915 for ; Wed, 13 Mar 1996 14:00:40 -0800 (PST) Received: from blaise.ibp.fr (blaise.ibp.fr [132.227.60.1]) by ibp.ibp.fr (8.6.12/jtpda-5.0) with ESMTP id XAA18517 ; Wed, 13 Mar 1996 23:00:38 +0100 Received: from (uucp@localhost) by blaise.ibp.fr (8.6.12/jtpda-5.0) with UUCP id XAA20580 ; Wed, 13 Mar 1996 23:00:37 +0100 Received: (from roberto@localhost) by keltia.freenix.fr (8.7.4/keltia-uucp-2.7) id WAA07521; Wed, 13 Mar 1996 22:56:49 +0100 (MET) From: Ollivier Robert Message-Id: <199603132156.WAA07521@keltia.freenix.fr> Subject: Re: Kernel only sees 64Mb of RAM To: robin@is.co.za Date: Wed, 13 Mar 1996 22:56:49 +0100 (MET) Cc: freebsd-bugs@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <199603131458.QAA22752@admin.is.co.za> from Robin Lunn at "Mar 13, 96 04:58:50 pm" X-Operating-System: FreeBSD 2.2-CURRENT ctm#1762 X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL11 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-bugs@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk It seems that Robin Lunn said: > Have looked through the html handbook and FreeBSD 2.X FAQ on kernel > configuration topics and see nothing of note. Will this problem be solved > by a kernel compiled on that machine that has 128Mb of memory? Do I change The FAQ is very clear on that point, maybe your own is outdated ? 8.6. I have 128 MB of RAM but it seems that the system use only the first 64 MB. What's going on ? Due to the manner in which FreeBSD gets the memory size from the BIOS, it can only detect 16 bits worth of Kbytes in size (65535 Kbytes = 64MB). If you have more than 64MB, FreeBSD will only see the first 64MB. To work around this problem, you need to use the kernel option specified below. There is a way to get complete memory information from the BIOS, but we don't have room in the bootblocks to do it. Someday when lack of room in the bootblocks is fixed, we'll use the extended BIOS functions to get the full memory information...but for now we're stuck with the kernel option. ______________________________________________________________________ options "MAXMEM=" ______________________________________________________________________ Where n is your memory in Kilobytes. For a 128 MB machine, you'd want to use 131072 -- Ollivier ROBERT -=- The daemon is FREE! -=- roberto@keltia.frmug.fr.net FreeBSD keltia.freenix.fr 2.2-CURRENT #6: Mon Mar 11 20:18:10 MET 1996