I've just upgraded my RAM from 48Meg (3 x 16M) to 128 Meg (4 x 32 M). PC Bios memory check is OK and Simtest boot floppy checks out OK.

I have added mem=128M to lilo.conf but free gives :

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 62748 31552 31196 0 1468 19700
-/+ buffers/cache: 10384 52364
Swap: 248996 0 248996

my /etc/lilo.conf is :

append="mem=128M ether=0,0,eth1"
boot = /dev/hda
#compact # faster, but won't work on all systems.
prompt
timeout = 50

I did run /sbin/lilo after I made the change.

The PC is an old 486 but I've got the motherboard manual that confirms this memory config is supported, in any case simmtest is happy. I'm using Slackware 9.0.


Any ideas ??

Would all 128M of that be avalible for linux to use? i have 512M Ram installed, but only 470M of it is avalible to linux, the other is used for onboard video etc... try using a lower number (like 110M) and see what happens

Thanks for the reply

I just tried 'mem=96M' but free still reports 62748.



The following is taken from the /var/log/messages file :

Nov 19 08:03:20 kamco kernel: BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
Nov 19 08:03:20 kamco kernel: user-defined physical RAM map:
Nov 19 08:03:20 kamco kernel: 64MB LOWMEM available.
Nov 19 08:03:20 kamco kernel: Initializing CPU#0
Nov 19 08:03:20 kamco kernel: Memory: 62636k/66496k available (1733k kernel code
, 3472k reserved, 568k data, 112k init, 0k highmem)


Does anyone know what 'LOWMEM' means ??


and the syslog contains the following :

Nov 19 08:07:05 kamco kernel: Linux version 2.4.20 (root@midas) (gcc version 3.2
.2) #2 Mon Mar 17 22:02:15 PST 2003
Nov 19 08:07:05 kamco kernel: BIOS-88: 0000000000000000 - 000000000009f000 (usa
ble)
Nov 19 08:07:05 kamco kernel: BIOS-88: 0000000000100000 - 00000000040f0000 (usa
ble)
Nov 19 08:07:05 kamco kernel: user: 0000000000000000 - 000000000009f000 (usable
)
Nov 19 08:07:05 kamco kernel: user: 0000000000100000 - 00000000040f0000 (usable
)
Nov 19 08:07:05 kamco kernel: On node 0 totalpages: 16624
Nov 19 08:07:05 kamco kernel: zone(0): 4096 pages.
Nov 19 08:07:05 kamco kernel: zone(1): 12528 pages.
Nov 19 08:07:05 kamco kernel: zone(2): 0 pages.
Nov 19 08:07:05 kamco kernel: Kernel command line: auto BOOT_IMAGE=Linux ro root
=302 mem=96M ether=0,0,eth1



Does anyone understand this ? Why is BIOS-88 and user the same ?? (9F000 is 64 Meg I think ...). What does 40F000 refer to ? is this the HD ?

OK Problem now solved ! I had to use the following in lilo.conf :

append="mem=exactmap 640k@0 mem=127M@1M"