Can't seem to gt google to show me info about the a6110a specificaly. It shows the a6100, and then with all sort of letter combinations after it, but not the "a". And the specs are different on different versions of a6110__.

Can I just install more memory?

I want to get a little more life out of this machine. I've been using it strictly with 32bit operating systems, and I know that they will not recognize the full 4GB of memory that is installed. But I note that a 64bit sysem would. It has 4 memory sockets 240 pin DDR2, now occupied with 4 memory strips of one GB each.

I note that 240 pin DDR2 x 2GB strips are available (or even 4GB). If it will make use of them, 4x2GB with a 64bit OS would, I think, be 8GB of ram.

hwinfo says "Clock: 1000 MHz" and gives gives me this line about the motherboard: Model: 15.107.1 "AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+"

(oops! looks like my signature is outdated.)

HP usually has great support. I might look at a few of the configuration or configurator sites for ram. They usually post the max ram and type.

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https://www.google.com/search?q=HP+P...specifications

check around there. what im finding is the A6110.X is country based and can handle between 2G - 8G depending on what the exact product number is. they were issued with winXP as their OS, so I would say if you have 4G now you are prob. near its limit.

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probably not would be my guess unless the mother board explicitly supports more, or you can flash an alternate bios such as coreboot (assuming one exists that supports your mainboard) which might be able to overcome that limit.

although do believe the linux kernel itself doesn't rely on the BIOS for memory access (and thus i believe hypothetically could use more ram than the bios explicitly supports, unless the computer can use the ram long enough boot the linux kernel in the first place that hypothetical ability is just that, a hypothetical with no practical application)

that being said however i DO know that this works with hard drives, as long as you put your kernel and second stage boot loader in a /boot partition within the first say, 512M to 1G (depending on the bios) of the drive, than you can use a drive significantly larger than the bios officially supports (i know from experience, putting a 120Gig IDE hard drive in an 80486 desktop unit and it worked perfectly)

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Thank you all for your replies.

Well, a6110a seems not to be listed anywhere, But (thanks lleb "A6110.X is country based and can handle between 2G - 8G depending...." Checking my motherboard listing, and some of these others I'm thinking it might work. So, I have ordered a couple of 2GB memory stick for the amd processor. If that (and a 64bit OS) gives me 6GB of memory, then I'll try for 8. If not, I'm stuck with a few sticks of memory.

frieza, Your remarks about bios,linux and memory makes me think about a trick that we used in DOS. I had a xt machine running dos, and added several memory boards to it. Technicaly DOS could only use 640k, but there were some programs that allowed me to use more than a megabyte. I was able to "Load-Hi" a number of memmory resident programs, and even a 'ram-disk'. I wonder if there is anything like that for Linux.

When it comes to disk size, I have been using 1T disk on this machine. But it is divided into smaller partitions. One partition is really a separate 300GB disk without any partitions. If I'm not mistaken, this machine came out with an 80GB disk. I don't know what XP would do wit allthat space, but Linux is great.

(I thought I edited that outdated 'sinature, but I see it's still representint the Presario I use to have.)

There are number of situations on adding ram. In some cases bios actually may see the ram correctly but the motherboard chipset won't access it correctly.

Be sure to install ram. Go to bios to see if it is seen and set correctly. Then run memtest a day or so.

granted, but then again the difference here was the 640k limit in dos was a software limit (albeit hard coded into the OS), although technically the hardware could handle more (for instance an 80286 based machine could have up to 4 megs installed, but you needed to overcome the 640k dos limit to utilize that)

as for hard drives, that had to do with drive geometry (CHS or LBA etc...), usually if i recall simply resulting in the bios mis labeling the hard drive as being smaller than it actually was, which with a linux kernel was only important during the boot phase when loading the first/second stage boot loaders, and finally, the kernel, which could be overcome by simply putting a boot partition in the first, say.. 512 megs of the drive

the question with ram is, first and foremost they have to be of a compatible clock speed or they won't work, and secondly, whether or not the bios/chipset will simply ignore any ram above and beyond what it's 'supposed' to be able to access, or whether the machine will fail it's POST. as for the extended memory trick, again that was a software limitation, modern operating systems i don't think have such a limitation and simply use as much ram as it can see, so assuming the machine boots with the extra ram, and the linux kernel can override what the chipset 'sees', than it should work.

this is mostly speculation mind you. since i myself haven't tried to use more ram than officially supported, but if you had a spare stick or two lying around to try it would be worth it, though i wouldn't spend too much money on an experiment that was more than likely going to fail.

Good luck, since it appears you already ordered additional ram.

Almost all 32-bit Linux distributions now include PAE by default. With PAE, 32-bit Linux can access up to 64GB of ram (maybe not make good use of more than 16GB, but you aren't looking at that much anyway).

A 64-bit OS in your system will have use of no more ram than a 32-bit OS with PAE.

Most of the reasons a motherboard or BIOS might limit you to 3 and a fraction GB of ram are specific to Intel or to far older AMD CPUs. With that CPU, a motherboard could have been designed to limit you to under 4GB of ram, but that would have been a very lame design (compared to Intel designs of the same vintage where motherboard support for a full 4GB or more added real cost).

You still might have some BIOS setting limiting you. It is often called something like "memory remapping" and may default to disabled. If there is such an option in the BIOS, it must be enabled.

How much of the 4GB does 32-bit Linux see?

If you haven't done a major amount of activity since booting, you can get the unambiguous info with
A block of lines in the output should start with
If the last of those starts
then motherboard/BIOS support for a full 4GB is enabled.
If it starts something like
then either the motherboard or (more likely) BIOS is limiting you to less than 4GB.

I'm pretty sure you are wrong. The BIOS is responsible for programming the portion of the chipset or CPU that gives physical addresses to the ram. Once the OS starts, any ram that was not given a physical address cannot be accessed. The BIOS or OS can use dmidecode to access information about ram without that ram having physical addresses, so either can report how much ram is physically installed. But it cannot use the ram without physical addresses.
Some of the first 4GB of physical addresses are reserved for things other than ram, so some of the first 4GB of ram must be given physical addresses above 4GB. If the BIOS doesn't do that (or the Intel chipset on the motherboard doesn't support that) then you are limited to 3 and a fraction GB. The AMD CPU listed above has that part of the system in the CPU chip, not in the motherboard chipset. That AMD CPU does support over 4GB of physical addresses, so any limitation would probably be in the BIOS, not the motherboard.

Hi,

From DuckDuckGo search: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/d...name=c01048277 it does look like you can boost the memory to 8GB for the Athlon 64 X2 (B) 4400+ 2.3 GHz (65W) based system.

Have fun & enjoy!

Lot's of info there. Thanks guys.

Johnsfine: "the last of those starts
Code:

BIOS-e820: 0000000100000000 -

then motherboard/BIOS support for a full 4GB is enabled." Seems to be the case here, although the command:

"hwinfo --memory" returns "...Memory Size: 3 GB + 256 MB.... " Four GB is installed.


onebuck: I hope you are right - and the link from hp seems to indicate that you are.

If I understand you correctly, the BIOS provided physical RAM map ends with an entry that shows a block of RAM starting at 0x100000000 (which is the 4GB address boundary) which indicates the BIOS has enabled nearly all of your 4GB of ram. But some tool (which I don't have a copy of, so it is harder to compare) seems to say pretty clearly that the RAM above the 4GB address boundary (over 3 and a quarter GB of usable RAM) is not available to the OS.

If this were happening a few years ago, I would be pretty sure your 32-bit kernel was not compiled with PAE support. But these days, it is quite rare for any distribution to compile a 32-bit kernel without PAE support.

So I don't know whether I am misunderstanding one of the nearly contradictory looking things you posted, or whether you really do have a 32-bit kernel without PAE.

Some details about your kernel would help answer that. For popular distributions, the kernel identification from uname -a would be enough for some experts here to know if it has PAE.

If your 32-bit kernel lacks PAE, you could reinstall Linux and choose 64-bit as seemed to be your initial intention. But if reinstalling is inconvenient (because of files and settings that might need to be manually backed up and restored), it may be easier to stick with 32-bit and just install a different kernel package. That can be done without disturbing much of anything else (closed source nVidia display drivers likely need to be reinstalled when changing kernels. But almost everything else would be undisturbed. Open source display drivers would update automatically with the kernel).

You are probably right - I guess I probably don't have a PAE kernel.

$ uname -a brought the followingline:
Linux david 3.2.0-23-generic #36-Ubuntu SMP Tue Apr 10 20:41:14 UTC 2012 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux
$

Get the current Ubuntu liveCD and try that - if it boots you have a PAE capable motherboard; Ubuntu no longer ship a non-PAE kernel (12.04 was the last).

I had not realized Ubuntu had defaulted to non PAE that recently. That is a non PAE kernel and does seem to be the last time Ubuntu defaulted to non PAE.

Without changing Ubuntu version, you can easily switch to a PAE kernel. The package is described here:
http://packages.ubuntu.com/precise/k...ux-generic-pae
I think it can be installed through whatever package installer you normally use.
That would give you access to almost 3/4 GB more Ram even before the new ram you ordered is installed and would let you use that new ram without reinstalling Linux.

I think we already established that the CPU supports PAE and that the motherboard and BIOS enabled RAM that requires PAE for access. The recent question was whether the installed kernel is non PAE (which now we see it is) vs. some more obscure reason the RAM is not now accessible.

Hi,

The OP's system uses ASUS Motherboard Name: M2N68-LA (HP's Name Narra2-GL8E) which specs a Athlon 64 X2 (B) 4400+ 2.3 GHz (65W). The MB supports 8GB for the AMD64 so the OP can increase the memory to 8 GB (4 x 2 GB) (64-bit OS). So why not use a X86_64 OS? instead of using PAE 32bit.

You guys are just creating work & confusion for the member. OP could use a X86_64 OS that would recognize the full memory installed. If not 8GB then 4GB. Upgrade the memory for that motherboard and use a x86_64 OS. I really do not care which OS but a 64bit would be the best choice.

I would suggest that the OP insure that the BIOS is up to date for MB

Hope this helps.
Have fun & enjoy!