dodgy bios? 'Bios may corrupt low RAM, working around it'
 

The quotes are for the worrying results of 'dmesg | less'. The motherboard is ASRock N68-S and the ram corsair. The same message occurs on Mint 9 and Suze 11.3.
My main question is, given that the kernel takes over after boot up, will the above restrict aspects of performance or will the kernel take care of shortfalls in the bios.

Fred.

As the kernel states in the message, it will work around it. I have set up many Ubuntu systems with the N68-S and never had problems.

Problem is probably that your chipset does not support memory remapping. If this is the case, just means that you will have a little less useable memory that what is actually installed.

I dont seem to get that message in "dmesg | less" with a N68S-UCC, 2 x 1GB Geil DDR2-800 RAM.

That could be due to slightly different BIOS versions.

dodgy bios etc
 

My board is the plain N68-S with no bios update. I wonder would there be any point adding a separate graphics card if the chipset will not do memory re-mapping?

Fred.

I cant be sure that your chipset/BIOS is can do memory remapping, but from everything I've seen from a quick search it should do. I dont think thats your problem...if it even is a problem.

I always prefer to use a video card over using onboard video. Apart from a few baords with 'sideport RAM', using onboard video always steals some RAM from the main system RAM. It will also use some of the RAM bandwidth.

BTW, the N68-S UCC (I used a slightly wrong name above, sorry) I tried 'dmesg | less' on is running a video card, a 8400GS. Awful card, dont get one. ;) I wonder if pulling the card and running 'dmesg | less' will get me the same 'BIOS may corrupt low RAM, working around it' warning? I'll give it a try in the next few days and see.

bios
 

cascade9, thanks that would be helpful as don't have any graphics cards laying around here. I notice that the filching of ram does not seem to happen on laptops and they, by their nature, must have on board graphics, perhaps just better ones!

Fred.

There are may laptops out there that have dedicated graphic-chips with their own RAM. Just a side note.

Most of the laptops I've seen do share RAM from the main system RAM. Theres some that dont, only nVidia or ATI GPU versions AFAIK.

The onboard video for laptops tend to be pretty much the same as the desktop versions with intel, with nVidia and ATI they tend to run a slower core, have less shaders, etc.. More core MHz, more shaders = more heat, which is a bad thing for laptops. Not that you need much in the way of core MHz or shaders for normal desktop use, even with things like desktop effects running.