Date: Mon, 22 May 2000 19:47:47 +1000 From: Jonathan Michaels <jon@welearn.com.au> To: Peter Jeremy <peter.jeremy@alcatel.com.au> Cc: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: curious about memory report usingfreebsd v3.3-release Message-ID: <20000522194744.A93893@phoenix.welearn.com.au> In-Reply-To: <00May18.061828est.115207@border.alcanet.com.au>; from Peter Jeremy on Thu, May 18, 2000 at 06:18:25AM %2B1000 References: <20000513201513.A39032@phoenix.welearn.com.au> <00May18.061828est.115207@border.alcanet.com.au>
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peter, On Thu, May 18, 2000 at 06:18:25AM +1000, Peter Jeremy wrote: > On Sat, May 13, 2000 at 08:15:51PM +1000, Jonathan Michaels wrote: > >my question is why does the freebsd installation bootstrap > >diskette report my (home built -- from quality, new parts on a > >supermicro motherboard p6sne) pentium pro's systm memory as > >being only 639 kbyte .. shouldn't it be 640 kbyte ?? > > PC BIOSes normally reserve 1KB of low-RAM for their own purposes. > FreeBSD 2.x ignored this and (AFAIK) just used all the memory. i would agree as the v2.x's all reported that thier was 640 kb on all the machines i have, from the 12 year old supermicro oems to the name branded supermicro recently aquired. i;ve made several boot floppies from the couple of 3.x versions that i have and all seem to have this hole. i started to think (read worry) i may have done somthing wrong yet again. > FreeBSD 3.x and later leaves the BIOS RAM alone so that the > kernel can safely use BIOS functions - primarily in the loader, > but also to determine total RAM size and for APM. it appears to be the loader that is making the report, its a bit hard to tell, the screen is small and i'm getting more fragile the longer i use this damnably small (17 inch, fro my eyes this is small) display. ok, thank you fro your reply, and to all the others who replied. i have drawn the conclusion that it is not a thing i need concern myslef with and that my computers will not chuck a wobbly over the "missing" kilobyte .. hopefully, freebsd will follow the same suite. i seem to remember that in the old days this 1 kb was used as part of a keyboard function routine and one could set the bios to either use extended memory (if you had some, that is) or to take some of the conventional memory, thus leaving the one kilobyte hole. it just looks odd and i don't cope too well with surprises, not from hardware that normally is quite stable and complaines very, very little. thank you, peter, thank you, all. warm regards jonathan -- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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