Re: [vox-tech] Physical Memory vs. Reported Memory

[Henry House <hajhouse@MAPShouseag.com>]

On Tue, Jul 10, 2001 at 12:24:23PM -0700, Jim Angstadt wrote:
> The hardware memory check during boot reports 
> 320MB of memory, which is correct.  There are 
> physical 256MB and 64MB memory modules.  But, 
> 'free' and 'top' report much less.  Free, with 
> the 'm' option reports 62MB available.  
> Top reports about 64MB available.

FYI, 

1. Memory size detection by the kernel is not reliable on i386
   architectures above 64Mb. 

2. The GRUB bootloader can generally detect the memory size reliably
   and will pass the size it finds to the kernel!

3. The hardware memory check is done by the BIOS, well before the kernel
   loads, so Linux knows nothing about it.

-- 
Henry House
OpenPGP key available from http://romana.hajhouse.org/hajhouse.asc

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