memory holes

Erik Udo erik.u at dnainternet.net
Sat Dec 23 06:21:23 PST 2006


I upgraded my hardware and software yesturday, and for some reason, 
FreeBSD only 'detects' 128MB of the memory, when the BIOS is clearly 
seeing 512MB. OpenBSD also finds 512MB of memory.

So i added one 128MB ECC memory. There was one 128MB PC100 and 256MB 
PC133 memory before, and it worked fine on 6.2-PRERELASE.

Now that i upgraded to 6.2-RC1, from 6.2-PRERELEASE and added the 128MB 
memory to the 384MB i had, the kernel started giving me this error on 
the first line of the kernel output:
"Too many holes in the physical address space, giving up"

Now, i searched google for anything, and found this earlier thread:
http://www.mail-archive.com/freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org/msg01624.html

I also found this:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2005-October/013932.html

Like the previous post says, the memory was found after the increased 
PHYSMAP_SIZE. I increased mine to 2*32, later 2*128. It didn't work.

Also someone told me to add this line to the kernel config:
options         MAXMEM=524288

That didn't work either.

I also tried to toggle all the bios settings on the computer, i even 
upgraded the bios. Nothing.

Now i found out that OpenBSD sees 512MB of memory, so there must be some 
kind of trick to make FreeBSD recognize that memory too.

Here is some output of my verbose boot:

with 512MB:
real memory  = 134234112 (128 MB)
Physical memory chunk(s):
0x0000000000001000 - 0x000000000009efff, 647168 bytes (158 pages)
0x0000000000100000 - 0x00000000003fffff, 3145728 bytes (768 pages)
0x0000000000c25000 - 0x0000000007d82fff, 118874112 bytes (29022 pages)
avail memory = 121798656 (116 MB)

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks,
Erik


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