Re: 4GB memory and Intel Dual-Core system

From: Dave Jones
Date: Thu Oct 27 2005 - 17:05:57 EST


On Thu, Oct 27, 2005 at 05:15:50PM -0400, Alejandro Bonilla wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Oct 2005 23:07:41 +0200, Marcel Holtmann wrote
> > Hi Alejandro,
> >
> > > > the board in this system is a Intel D945GNT and the box tells me the
> > > > maximum supported amount of RAM is 4 GB. So there should be a way to
> > > > address this amount memory.
> > >
> > > The board did take the 4GB of RAM and it is finding them, therefore supports
> > > them. It is just not designed to give a full 4GB of RAM to the system, it only
> > > gives 3.4XGB RAM and the rest is really not used, then basically the system
> > > just tries to give the 0.6xGB RAM remaining a task by it being used by "System
> > > Resources"
> > >
> > > This isn't really Linux dependant.
> >
> > so there is no way to give me back the "lost" memory. Is it possible
> > that another motherboard might help?
>
> AFAIK, No. AMD and Intel will always do the same thing until we all move to
> real IA64.

Somehow, I doubt AMD see it that way :-)

Some boards at least have a BIOS option to support 'memory hoisting'
to map the 'lost' memory above the 4G address space.

I suspect a lot of the lower-end (and older) boards however don't have
this option, as they were not tested with 4GB.

Dave

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/