Mike Galbraith wrote:
>
> If crashes are routine on this machine, I'd recommend that you take
> a serious look at your ram. (or if you're overclocking, don't)
Crashes were routine, and I was not overclocking, so I took Mike's
advice and bought a new 256MB DIMM. The computer hasn't crashed
once since I installed it. Now, though, I have a curious though
fairly irrelevant problem. My kernel apparently sees less RAM than
I have.
[alex@localhost /home]$ free -m
total used free shared buffers
cached
Mem: 251 209 42 60
61 92
-/+ buffers/cache: 55 196
I strongly doubt this can be a bug in the kernel. Could anyone
explain to me why this might happen?
Alex
On Wed, Mar 14, 2001 at 03:06:09PM +0100, Alex Baretta wrote:
> Mike Galbraith wrote:
> >
> > If crashes are routine on this machine, I'd recommend that you take
> > a serious look at your ram. (or if you're overclocking, don't)
>
> Crashes were routine, and I was not overclocking, so I took Mike's
> advice and bought a new 256MB DIMM. The computer hasn't crashed
> once since I installed it. Now, though, I have a curious though
> fairly irrelevant problem. My kernel apparently sees less RAM than
> I have.
>
>
> [alex@localhost /home]$ free -m
> total used free shared buffers
> cached
> Mem: 251 209 42 60
> 61 92
> -/+ buffers/cache: 55 196
>
>
> I strongly doubt this can be a bug in the kernel. Could anyone
> explain to me why this might happen?
when you boot, your bios decides how much ram is "really" available,
usually for good reasons. If the bios knows that its power management
routines need a few meg off the top it'll report a few less meg to the OS
that is to be booted. You can tell linux to ignore the bios with the kernel
parameter mem=256, but I highly recommend *against* it in this case. Look
into it.
Mordy
> Alex
> -
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>
Alex Baretta wrote:
> [alex@localhost /home]$ free -m
> total used free shared buffers
> cached
> Mem: 251 209 42 60
> 61 92
>
> I strongly doubt this can be a bug in the kernel. Could anyone
> explain to me why this might happen?
grep Memory /var/log/kern.log
You've got your kernel itself loading into ram, reserved memory, etc.
I've got 48 meg in this test box of mine, and a free -m shows 46, a free shows
47356. Divided by 1024, gives 46, when rounded off. So yes, free -m is
correct. That 251 meg is what's available to use, after your kernel loads,
etc.
mike
>> If crashes are routine on this machine, I'd recommend that you take
>> a serious look at your ram. (or if you're overclocking, don't)
>
>Crashes were routine, and I was not overclocking, so I took Mike's
>advice and bought a new 256MB DIMM. The computer hasn't crashed
>once since I installed it. Now, though, I have a curious though
>fairly irrelevant problem. My kernel apparently sees less RAM than
>I have.
The kernel itself takes up some RAM, which is simply subtracted from the
"total memory available" field in the memory summaries available to
user-mode processes. This is perfectly normal.
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Jonathan Morton wrote:
>
> >> If crashes are routine on this machine, I'd recommend that you take
> >> a serious look at your ram. (or if you're overclocking, don't)
> >
> >Crashes were routine, and I was not overclocking, so I took Mike's
> >advice and bought a new 256MB DIMM. The computer hasn't crashed
> >once since I installed it. Now, though, I have a curious though
> >fairly irrelevant problem. My kernel apparently sees less RAM than
> >I have.
>
> The kernel itself takes up some RAM, which is simply subtracted from the
> "total memory available" field in the memory summaries available to
> user-mode processes. This is perfectly normal.
The kernel reserves 4m for hilself. The off by one error is a rounding
bug.
Martin Dalecki wrote:
>
> Jonathan Morton wrote:
> >
> > The kernel itself takes up some RAM, which is simply subtracted from the
> > "total memory available" field in the memory summaries available to
> > user-mode processes. This is perfectly normal.
>
> The kernel reserves 4m for hilself. The off by one error is a rounding
> bug.
Sounds pretty reasonable. I have actually tested the memory card
with memtest, just to make sure that it was all there and working
properly, and the test succeeded, so it must really be the kernel
eating away a few megs.
Alex