Date: Wed, 6 Dec 1995 19:57:33 -0500 (EST) From: "William A. Arbaugh" <waarbau@super.org> To: Kevin Martin <sigma@mcs.com> Cc: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: >16Mb on ISA/EISA Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.951206194819.20711B-100000@descartes> In-Reply-To: <m0tN4To-000IDUC@venus.mcs.com>
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On Tue, 5 Dec 1995, Kevin Martin wrote: > > I checked the archives, but was unable to find an answer to this question, > although it's been posed before in one form or another: > > I have a 486 with 28Mb of RAM (don't ask me why so much). When I installed > a recent snapshot (just before the release), FreeBSD would only recognize > 16Mb of that RAM. > > What, if anything, can I do to get the additional RAM recognized and used? > This is an HP Vectra, EISA bus I believe. > The problem is likely that the BIOS on your machine will only advertise 16MB because of the OLD AT bus limitation. My Dell EISA machines have the same problem. In several discussions with Dell, their position was to bad....the IBM spec is gospel and we won't change. The blasted BIOS even changes the value to 16M if I try and make it higher (I even tried to slam the value in with some of the BIOS write programs out there- no luck. The next time I booted the BIOS said hmmm 32M isn't right changing to 16M.) So here's what I did: I just modified the var biosextmem in the kernel (I can't remember the exact file name) to the appropriate number, and then remade the kernel. Ideally, the kernel should, if on an EISA machine, probe the EISA BIOS for the right value. I wasn't able to find where that was though. bill ---------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Arbaugh "Waste of time is the most waarbau@super.org extravagant of all expenses" waa@dsl.cis.upenn.edu -Theophrastus ----------------------------------------------------------------
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