One of my machines smoked last week so when tearing it apart for spare parts I noticed the the PC2700 CL 2.5 memory is what my wife's machine uses and she had only 512MB so I took the opportunity to throw in a couple of DIMMs. When I boot Linux (and I'm writing this from Linux running the new memory so the machine works) top reports only about 900MB while BIOS itself says 2GB. I fired up memtest86 and it reports 2GB. It's been running memory tests for a couple of hours now with no problems so it seems like it should work.
Is there anything in the kernel config that would stop a 2.6.32-gentoo kernel from seeing all the memory? I have double checked that the memory does seem to be seated well in the DIMM sockets. The box is an old eMachines thing that has no support and so far I can't find any BIOS updates. How does memory get reported up to the kernel? Is that something in the kernel (i.e. - choosing the proper chipset support or something) or is it purely the return from some sort of BIOS call? If so can it be tested or circumvented to get the machine to recognize everything I've put in? Thanks, Mark m...@dragonfly ~ $ cat /proc/meminfo MemTotal: 904312 kB MemFree: 569140 kB Buffers: 12084 kB Cached: 161656 kB SwapCached: 0 kB Active: 170828 kB Inactive: 130708 kB Active(anon): 130084 kB Inactive(anon): 0 kB Active(file): 40744 kB Inactive(file): 130708 kB Unevictable: 0 kB Mlocked: 0 kB SwapTotal: 1052216 kB SwapFree: 1052216 kB Dirty: 32 kB Writeback: 0 kB AnonPages: 127804 kB Mapped: 46652 kB Shmem: 2288 kB Slab: 15444 kB SReclaimable: 7140 kB SUnreclaim: 8304 kB KernelStack: 1328 kB PageTables: 1484 kB NFS_Unstable: 0 kB Bounce: 0 kB WritebackTmp: 0 kB CommitLimit: 1504372 kB Committed_AS: 416504 kB VmallocTotal: 122880 kB VmallocUsed: 44728 kB VmallocChunk: 66616 kB DirectMap4k: 15932 kB DirectMap4M: 901120 kB m...@dragonfly ~ $
