Re: Intel-Quad on GA-P35-S3 motherboard with 4*2GB

[Wojciech Kromer <wojciech.kromer@dgt.com.pl>]

>   
>> It's Intel-quad, so there are 4 CPUs.
>>     
>
> Weird.  The message about the MTRR on all the CPUs not maching sound
> like a strange bios bug.  Are you running the latest bios version?
>   
>   
See the story below.
> Looks to match the MTRR setup at least.  So how much ram does the kernel
> actually want to use?
>
>   
a)With mem=8GB parameter I had:

#free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 6473 474 5999 0 29 278


b) Without mem=8GM system slows down while booting and sometimes restart...


==== So the story begins ===========================

It's strange GIGABYTE missinformation, but:
- my board came with F2 release
- after detecting memory problem, I've upgraded it to F4 (latest at this 
moment)
- next day came with F5 release ,
there was only one info: "Fix PS2 keyboard compatibility issues",
so I decided *not* to upgrade BIOS

But yesterday I've finally upgraded to F5 release.
... and here is *surrprise*: MTRR changed to:

#cat /proc/mtrr
reg00: base=0x00000000 ( 0MB), size=4096MB: write-back, count=1
reg01: base=0xc0000000 (3072MB), size=1024MB: uncachable, count=1
reg02: base=0xa0000000 (2560MB), size= 512MB: uncachable, count=1
reg03: base=0x100000000 (4096MB), size=4096MB: write-back, count=1
reg04: base=0x200000000 (8192MB), size=2048MB: write-back, count=1
reg05: base=0x260000000 (9728MB), size= 512MB: uncachable, count=1
reg06: base=0x9ff00000 (2559MB), size= 1MB: write-through, count=1

Now there are no complains about MTRR in dmesg.

E820 seems to be the same:

BIOS-e820: 0000000000000000 - 000000000009f800 (usable)
BIOS-e820: 000000000009f800 - 00000000000a0000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 00000000000f0000 - 0000000000100000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 0000000000100000 - 000000009fee0000 (usable)
BIOS-e820: 000000009fee0000 - 000000009fee3000 (ACPI NVS)
BIOS-e820: 000000009fee3000 - 000000009fef0000 (ACPI data)
BIOS-e820: 000000009fef0000 - 000000009ff00000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 00000000c0000000 - 00000000c4000000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 00000000fec00000 - 0000000100000000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 0000000100000000 - 0000000260000000 (usable)

And finally I have my 8GB working without any kernel parameter,

# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 7988 1120 6868 0 88 612

Now i need to rerun memory tests.
Thank you for helping me with this stuff.