Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2004 19:12:13 -0400 From: Don Bowman <don@sandvine.com> To: 'John Kennedy' <jk@jk.homeunix.net>, freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: RE: Any way to limit available memory? [5.2.1-R-p5] Message-ID: <FE045D4D9F7AED4CBFF1B3B813C85337045D8B72@mail.sandvine.com>
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From: John Kennedy [mailto:jk@jk.homeunix.net] > It looks like one of my Dell boxes has some memory that is > accessible but > shouldn't be. Sort of peculiar in that it: > > 1: Is .2MB in from the upper memory limit, and changes when > available memory changes > 2: Isn't slot or memory-stick dependent > 3: Can lock the machine up solid when you write certain data > patterns to it > 4: Doesn't seem to be OS-dependent (Memtest86 ISO, FreeBSD) > > Between the data corruption (segmentation violations, > mostly), the memory > location (we tend to have problems after the machine has been up and > thrashing for a while) and the symptoms (periodic solid > lockups) it looks > like this may be the smoking gun for some of the problems > we've been seeing > on that machine. > > I'll obviously be pursuing some solutions in the near future (BIOS > upgrades, Dell hardware diagnostics, hard-coding available memory for > operating system, etc). > > For the short term, however, is there some way to get the > system to think > that we have ~1MB less RAM than it actually tests for? This is the SMM [System Management Mode]. Its owned by a special virtual machine. You can set hw.physmem= to restrict access.
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