From owner-freebsd-doc  Wed Nov 22 17: 1:13 2000
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From: "Malcolm McGrath" <mjmac@pineview.net>
To: <doc@FreeBSD.org>
Subject: RE: The FAQ-- a request for an addition to it:
Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 11:31:18 +1030
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Could you please add in the FAQ that you will need to recompile the kernel
somewhere in the section of the FAQ below.

I assumed wrongly that this option was like kernel boot time option and went
around half arsed looking for it. :).

Thanks for reading this email.

Malcolm McGrath
(Yes i am a newbie.)

<QUOTE FROM FAQ>
>3.11. I have 128 MB of RAM but the system only uses 64 MB.

>Due to the manner in which FreeBSD gets the memory size from the BIOS, it
>can only detect 16 bits worth of Kbytes in size (65535 Kbytes = 64MB) (or
>less... some BIOSes peg the memory size to 16M). If you have more than
>64MB, FreeBSD will attempt to detect it; however, the attempt may fail.
>
>To work around this problem, you need to use the kernel option specified
>below. There is a way to get complete memory information from the BIOS, but
>we don't have room in the bootblocks to do it. Someday when lack of room in
>the bootblocks is fixed, we'll use the extended BIOS functions to get the
>full memory information...but for now we're stuck with the kernel option.
>
>options "MAXMEM=n"
>
>Where n is your memory in Kilobytes. For a 128 MB machine, you'd want to
>use 131072.
</QUOTE>





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