Hi, I had to recompile my kernel (2.4.22-10mdksmp) with highmem enabled to get it to see all 2GB of my physical memory. It sees it now (ie total mem = 2GB), but /proc/meminfo shows highfree=0, while top shows only <10% of physical memory being used by running processes. So now, total RAM is 2GB and total free RAM is <700MB. Here's /proc/meminfo immediately after startup:

total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
Mem: 2118115328 1435373568 682741760 0 9936896 82534400
Swap: 1077501952 0 1077501952
MemTotal: 2068472 kB
MemFree: 666740 kB
MemShared: 0 kB
Buffers: 9704 kB
Cached: 80600 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
Active: 57828 kB
Inactive: 32628 kB
HighTotal: 1179584 kB
HighFree: 0 kB
LowTotal: 888888 kB
LowFree: 666740 kB
SwapTotal: 1052248 kB
SwapFree: 1052248 kB

I tested whether this is a real problem by writing a small program that allocates a big chunk of memory (1.5GB). Sure enough, as soon as the remaining LowFree is used up, it starts slowly digging into swap, so it seems I really can't use HighMem.

Extra info-- I have a dual xeon, all memory checks out in POST and Win2K (dual-boot) uses it fine. I'm new to Linux and don't know how to diagnose this problem further.
I'd really appreciate any help!
Thanks,
Noah