Dell PE 1950 - Only seeing 3.2 gigs of ram

[Chuck Swiger]

On Jan 10, 2007, at 1:47 PM, Jeff MacDonald wrote:
> I put a fresh install of 6.1-RELEASE on a dell poweredge 1950 server.
> It's configured with 4 gigs of ram.
>
> However when I boot i get the following right before DMESG
>
> 786432k above 4GB ignored
>
> Which is strange, but then dmesg shows this
>
> real memory  = 3489300480 (3327 MB)
> avail memory = 3414659072 (3256 MB)

Unless you compile a kernel with PAE, which extends the addressable  
physical memory, or have a EM64T capable CPU, the system is limited  
to only addressing 4GB of memory.  However, the system also needs to  
make the various PCI devices and the AGP aperture accessible in  
memory space, so they typically reserve 512MB or 768MB at the top of  
the address space for that purpose; that memory is being remapped  
above 4GB, causing the message you see.

It's probably reasonable to either live with it, or move 1GB to some  
other machine, if you can't run a 64-bit system or you have issues  
enabling PAE.

-- 
-Chuck