5.3-RELEASE on Dell PowerEdge 2850
Dan Nelson
dnelson at allantgroup.com
Wed Oct 27 08:23:16 PDT 2004
In the last episode (Oct 27), Tom Gidden said:
> I've recently got a few Dell PowerEdge 2850 machines with 4 GB RAM to
> build a new database cluster. However, unlike our existing PowerEdge
> 2650 machines, they're only recognising about 3.25 GB. The machines
> are pretty much standard, with no extra cards (just the built-in
> MegaRAID).
>
> As a last resort, I've tried rebuilding the kernel with
> MAXMEM=(4*1024*1024), which produces some really fun crashes (which I
> can supply if necessary). The BIOS seems to be devoid of anything
> remotely useful to tweak.
>
> Any ideas?
>
> Here's a dmesg from the non-crashing kernel: [note, the first line
> is from memory and might be incorrect]
>
> 786426K of memory above 4GB ignored
It looks like you will need to enable PAE to access the rest of that
memory (see the pae manpage; some hardware will not work with it
enabled). Dell has apparently put quite a bit of your memory past the
4GB point, and left a 700MB hole somewhere in lower memory. I think if
you do a boot -v, it will print the memory ranges.
--
Dan Nelson
dnelson at allantgroup.com
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