Free Shows Less RAM Than Is Installed

pete1234 · 05-16-2007, 01:08 PM

I have two 1gig memory sticks in my machine, and they're both recognized by my bios, however, free only shows about half of the ram that's installed:

Code:

 free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           883        273        609          0         13         58
-/+ buffers/cache:        202        681
Swap:          959          0        959

Any help or insight is appreciated.

ramram29 · 05-16-2007, 01:15 PM

The same thing happened to me. You may be using the 486 kernel instead of the 686 kernel. Run 'uname -a' and tell me what it is. The 486 kernel only supports up to 1GB of memory. I think the 686 supports 4GB to 16GB of memory and the 686-large supports up to 64GB - I think.

pete1234 · 05-16-2007, 01:19 PM

Hey, thanks for the reply. No I'm using i686. I always tend to solve my own problem within about five minutes after I make a post about it. I forgot to enable high memory support in the kernel. I'm rebuilding as I type so I'll report back if this solves my problem.

pete1234 · 05-16-2007, 02:07 PM

Yup, enabling high memory support in the kernel solved that problem.