Re: alienware hardware - memory problem?

[Helge Hafting <helge.hafting@hist.no>]

Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:

>because slow down seems to be linked to memory: brk(0) takes on average
>0.5-1.5 second, I've decided to run silly memtest...
>I have around 1GB total on that beast, I turned off swap and did memtest
>1G
>  
>
Memory.  Could it be the good old MTRR problem?
Try "cat /proc/mtrr" and check that _all_ ordinary memory
is covered by a write-back mtrr.

Having most of the memory covered lacking a little at the top only
is not good enough - you'll see a major slowdown as linux tend to
use the topmost memory most and that will be very slow without
a MTRR.

If it indeed is a mtrr problem, confirm it by booting with mem=<low number>
and see that the machine is faster when not using the "slow" memory.
After that, get a bios upgrade or echo something useable
into /proc/mtrr

Helge Hafting