I have a workstation with 4Gigs of memory, and when the system boots up I only see 3.6Gigs.

Is there a reason why?

# cat /proc/memory
total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
Mem: 3565252608 2314182656 1251069952 0 89726976 1866567680


I passed me mem=4096m to the kernel and it still didn't help.

Any suggestions?

There are 2 levels of highmem in a kernel, the 1Gig+, 4Gig+ and <=64Gig options... now, the 1Gig option is actually 960Meg, so maybe the 4Gig highmem is actually 3.6Gig, I just took a look at the menuconfig option and make certain.

Also, just in case, have you checked the BIOS options to make it do a slow count of the RAM to be sure that its reporting that on right.

With that said... 4Gigs!!! Back in '95 I was sitting around in awe of my friend Jer showing off his 1.2Gb hard drive. Gahhh...

Cheers,

Finegan

The problem comes into play with a DSP card I'm integrating into the system. Ir requires non-alocated system memory for it to run (kinda a memory buffer before it writes to disk). So I have to limit the memory to 3Gigs by passing the mem= arguement to the kernel. If I try to allocate more than ~600M to the card, the driver crashes. It's as if the system is skipping the first ~400M of memory.

I don't have the option to do a slow count, it's a DELL.

With all its horsepower, DELL really does handicap it in a lot of ways.

Thanks,

Pete