[ale] Why doesn't any OS see my memory?

[Barlow, Jim D]

Gents,

This is a well known issue with resource requirements for the
PCI-Express itself, not a video card hanging off of the end of it.

You will want the new BIOS that lets you remap some of this.

On a 32bit Operating system: One is seeing less memory in the system
than what was installed, i.e. on dell 2850 4GB installed, only 3.1gb
available to OS. 

Reason: System resources (IOAPIC Ranges, Chipset specific address
ranges, PCI MMIO, SMM space etc.) are be assigned memory addresses right
below the 4G address.  PCI-Express is the hog. 

DELL has an internal bios, they term an XREV bios that will be made
available to customers in Q3. It will allow one to release areas of
memory being reserved for I/O. While it will not solve the whole memory
hole problem on 32bit os's it will help customers recover more of the
memory. 

Regards -jim

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Greg
To: ale at ale.org
Freemyer
Sent: Friday, October 07, 2005 12:24 PM
To: Michael Hirsch; Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] Why doesn't any OS see my memory?

On 10/7/05, Michael Hirsch <mdhirsch at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/6/05, Drag0n <dragon at atlantacon.org> wrote:
> > Does the motherboard see it in the Bios? If so, then it's something
to
> > do with the OS's, if not, it could be incompatable ram, and old bios
> > update, hardware limitations.
>
>  BIOS sees it fine, it's only(!) in Windows, Linux, and FreeBDS that
see
> ~3.5 gig.
>
>  Michael
>

Out of curiosity, what version of Windows?

I know most Windows versions have a 4 GB limit to ram access (or maybe
the limit is 3.5 GB??).  Maybe all of the above have a similar
threshold and you have not got the various kernels configured to get
past that limit.

For Windows 2003 Server you have to have the Enterprise Edition ($3500
IIRC) to see past the 4GB point (or is it the 3.5 GB point?).

Greg
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