Date: Mon, 6 Feb 1995 17:32:07 +1100 From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au> To: kuku@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de, terry@cs.weber.edu Cc: freebsd-hackers@freefall.cdrom.com Subject: Re: Bios basemem (637K) != RTC basemem (640K) Message-ID: <199502060632.RAA32253@godzilla.zeta.org.au>
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>Subject: Re: Bios basemem (637K) != RTC basemem (640K) >> >> Excuse my ignorance, but what does that mean? Do I have to worry? It means that your BIOS reserves 3K of memory for internal use and O/S's that use the BIOS see only 637K of base memory instead of 640K. FreeBSD currently sees both and uses 640K. This may change. The handling of extended memory _will_ change to support systems with more than 64MB. FreeBSD should never have looked in the CMOS for the memory sizes. >It means that either your BIOS starts counting at 0 and something swiped >2k of memory, or your BIOS starts counting a 1 and someone swiped 3k of >memory. Or your BIOS starts counting at -2 and nothing is swiping any >memory at all. This confusion may apply to the memory size in the CMOS (I don't think it does; I think some BIOS's just pre-allocate the memory that they are going to steal from the top of base memory) but it doesn't apply to the BIOS memory-size call. >Depending on your machine and BIOS, it's probably nothing worse than >the user configurable IDE drive table. This is a standard feature of AMI BIOS's. Don't use it unless you have to. Bruce
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