memory holes

[Peter Jeremy]

On Sat, 2006-Dec-23 19:30:52 +0200, Erik Udo wrote:
>Both find 512MB of ram, but..
>NetBSD crashes after boot stage when it starts to load the kernel. 
>(thanks NetBSD team for not building the kernel image with debugging 
>symbols, but you did build it with DDB)
>
>OpenBSD finds 512MB of ram too, but...
>it wont find my hard disk, even thought it has wd0 as a hard disk in dmesh.
>
>To add to my previous post, i tested with 128MB PC100 + 32MB PC100. Both 
>memory modules was found by FreeBSD and put to use.
>
>Which leads me to the conclusion: Why can't FreeBSD use PC133 memory 
>when OpenBSD can? Did someone forget to port drivers for memory modules? :P

Actually, crashing or misbehaving whist trying to boot suggests to me
that neither OpenBSD nor NetBSD can use the extra memory they "find".
Correctly configuring the memory controllers for the physical memory
you have is the responsibility of the BIOS.  It seems likely that
either some of your RAM is bad (a 5 minute memtest may not detect
this) and/or mixing different sizes and types of memory has confused
the BIOS.

There are a variety of different ways to work out how much memory is
in your computer.  It's quite possible that {Free,Net,Open}BSD are
using different mechanisms and coming up with different amounts.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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