Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1998 19:38:57 +0100 From: Christopher Raven <c.raven@ukonline.co.uk> To: "Alain G. Fabry" <fabry@panam.edu> Cc: Stormy Henderson <stormy@futuresouth.com>, questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: PC mag ref (good and bad) to FreeBSD Message-ID: <36239E41.86E5588D@ukonline.co.uk> References: <015d01bdf6d2$6d25a2b0$5531d5c6@earth.coserve.org>
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Alain G. Fabry wrote: > > >saturated, so adding RAM wouldn't help any. Second, do you think the > >folks at PC Mag recompiled their kernel to utilize more than 64MB of RAM? > > Just wondering with this statement. I have just added 64MB to my starting > 64MB of RAM, and I haven't made any changes to the kernel. > Do I need to recompile the kernel, if so, what/where do I need to > change/add? > Thanks, > > Alain It's in the FAQ (http://www.freebsd.org/faq) 8.6. I have 128 MB of RAM but it seems that the system use only the first 64 MB. What's going on ? 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). If you have more than 64MB, FreeBSD will only see the first 64MB. 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 -- [ Christopher Raven [ E-mail: c.raven@ukonline.co.uk [ ICQ: 2254369 [ To err is human, to power is FreeBSD To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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