FreeBSD-4.11 and 4GB RAM

[Odhiambo Washington]

* On 17/04/06 14:32 -0400, Kris Kennaway wrote:
| On Mon, Apr 17, 2006 at 10:52:30AM +0300, Odhiambo Washington wrote:
| > * On 16/04/06 12:40 -0800, Beech Rintoul wrote:
| > | On Sunday 16 April 2006 11:18, Odhiambo Washington wrote:
| > | > On my brand new Dell PowerEdge, now running FreeBSD 4.11-RELEASE under
| > | > test, there is 4GB RAM, but looking at dmesg.boot, this is what shows:
| > | >
| > | > real memory 268173312 (261888K bytes)
| > | > available memory 255455235 (249468K bytes)
| > | >
| > | > This is 2GB RAM only showing, with kernel.GENERIC.
| > | >
| > | > There must be something I need to compile in the kernel so as to access
| > | > more than 2GB RAM.
| > | >
| > | > I have compiled "options PAE" in the kernel but it still does not see
| > | > the full 4GB RAM.
| > | 
| > | 4.11 will soon be completely unsupported, besides putting 4.11 on a new server 
| > | is akin to putting a flathead-6 engine in a Ferrari. You should 
| > | upgrade/reinstall 6-pr and go from there. You will have far fewer problems.
| > 
| > If it were not that I really respect your name.... ;)
| > Anyway, I know about the fact that 4.11 is not gonna be supported. All 
| > my other systems are running 5.5-PRE and 6.1-PRE and you can see there 
| > is really no problem with updating all those even to -CURRENT... which
| > I am not afraid to do.
| > 
| > Simple question: How do I make 4.11 see the 4GB RAM?
| 
| I'm not aware of any special steps required.  Does 6.x see the extra
| RAM?
| 
| Kris


After this prodding, I looked further. In the BIOS of this box, when you 
leave "OS Install mode" to "ON", it limits the available RAM to 256MB.
Why the hell they do that could be explained elsewhere. I think some OS
will choke at so much RAM.
Once I turned this to "off", my server now sees 4GB RAM and is blazing 
fast!



-Wash

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