Greetings folks,

I'm running Debian testing.

Free and top are reporting 11431652 of ram when I have 12 gig. What happened to the other gig?

Thanks in advance for any enlightenent,
--glenn aka PsychoHermit

[edit]
Booted Windoze and checked 'system'. It reports 11.2 gig usable, so that solves that.
[/edit]

Some could be in use for graphics, some may be in cache....

Firstly, it depends on how you measure RAM. Base 2, Base 8, Base 10
Do this:
Ok, which one of those is correct?

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Does BIOS count it? How do you get to 12? I.e. 8+4 or 4+4+1+1+1+1 or what? If the latter do you have a 1GB module that isnt plugged in all the way?

Systems with 12 GB usually only report 11 GiB since the units are different.

Sales uses GB (12,000,000,000) (12 x 10 to the 9th) since that sounds larger.
Computers measure that as GiB which is actually 11.1759 GiB.
Calculated the other way, 1 GIB is 1.0737 GB.

Thus it often trips up many when they see what is being reported.
12 GB is advertised, but it actually is only slightly over 11 GiB and when they see the GiB quantity they wonder why.

The difference is the units used to display the value. Powers of 10 for GB and powers of 2 for GiB.

Even within linux some apps display with one unit and others display the other units. It really can be confusing.

My system with 32 GB RAM displays 31.26 GiB when I use inxi or 32776108 KB when I use free to look at it.

Understanding units and what utility uses which is important.

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It's 4 gig and 8 gig modules, so everything must be seated properly. I'm sure bios counts it but it's not displayed.

Thanks,
--glenn