Re: BIOS detects 4 GB RAM, but kernel does not

From: Robert Hancock
Date: Fri Jul 28 2006 - 13:05:57 EST


Jan Engelhardt wrote:
Essentially I don't think there is much you can do about this on this board.
The memory space starting at around 3.2GB is being used by the memory-mapped IO
regions for the PCI and PCI Express devices and motherboard resources and
therefore "covers up" the RAM in that part of the address space. The solution
to this is for the system to remap the affected memory above the 4GB mark,
which is possible with Athlon 64/Opteron CPUs and on some of the Intel server
chipsets. However, I don't think any Intel desktop chipsets support this for
some unfathomable reason.

Maybe PAE can help?

No.. it's not a matter of being unable to reach the address space, but the memory used by the IO regions is essentially overridden and unavailable to the kernel. PAE is not applicable on x86-64 anyway..

--
Robert Hancock Saskatoon, SK, Canada
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Home Page: http://www.roberthancock.com/


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