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Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1998 19:38:57 +0100
From: Christopher Raven <c.raven@ukonline.co.uk>
Organization: CIAN
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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
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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

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