Re: 4GB memory and Intel Dual-Core system

[Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>]

On Thu, Oct 27, 2005 at 05:15:50PM -0400, Alejandro Bonilla wrote:
 > On Thu, 27 Oct 2005 23:07:41 +0200, Marcel Holtmann wrote
 > > Hi Alejandro,
 > > 
 > > > > the board in this system is a Intel D945GNT and the box tells me the
 > > > > maximum supported amount of RAM is 4 GB. So there should be a way to
 > > > > address this amount memory.
 > > > 
 > > > The board did take the 4GB of RAM and it is finding them, therefore supports
 > > > them. It is just not designed to give a full 4GB of RAM to the system, it only
 > > > gives 3.4XGB RAM and the rest is really not used, then basically the system
 > > > just tries to give the 0.6xGB RAM remaining a task by it being used by "System
 > > > Resources"
 > > > 
 > > > This isn't really Linux dependant.
 > > 
 > > so there is no way to give me back the "lost" memory. Is it possible
 > > that another motherboard might help?
 > 
 > AFAIK, No. AMD and Intel will always do the same thing until we all move to
 > real IA64.

Somehow, I doubt AMD see it that way :-)

Some boards at least have a BIOS option to support 'memory hoisting'
to map the 'lost' memory above the 4G address space.

I suspect a lot of the lower-end (and older) boards however don't have
this option, as they were not tested with 4GB.

		Dave