[lug] Why doesn't any OS see my memory?

[Zan Lynx]

On Thu, 2005-10-06 at 14:18 -0600, Michael Hirsch wrote:
> Howdy,
> 
> We have a bunch of newish Dell workstations with 4 gig of RAM.  The
> BIOS sees it all.  But when we boot to Linux or Windows only about 3.5
> Gig is there.  I mean that the various tools to display the RAM should
> only 3.5 Gig.  Actually, Windows and Linux show slightly different
> amounts, but both are significantly below 4 gig.
> 
> Is this normal?  Has anyone else seen this?

Yeah, as others have said, it's normal.  I believe that you can get to
that missing 512 MB by using the PAE memory extensions.  Try adding /PAE
to the boot line in Window's boot.ini.  For Linux I think you need to
run a kernel compiled with HIGHMEM64G.  Fedora's i686 kernels have that
by default I think.

Or, if the system has a new enough Intel chip, it will run in x86_64
mode.
-- 
Zan Lynx <zlynx at acm.org>
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