Hi there!

I have 4GB of RAM, but the system is swapping A LOT. I think I will have
to go to 64 bit, but I need some time for that, and I need to use the
system in the meantime.

But: free -m shows only 2787 MB of total memory. I know I cannot use all
the 4G, but shouldn't there be at least 3GB or even a little more
available? What is your output of free -m?

wonko@weird ~ $ zgrep HIGHMEM /proc/config.gz
# CONFIG_NOHIGHMEM is not set
CONFIG_HIGHMEM4G=y
# CONFIG_HIGHMEM64G is not set
CONFIG_HIGHMEM=y
# CONFIG_DEBUG_HIGHMEM is not set

Wonko

On 06/02/2010 03:27 PM, Alex Schuster wrote:

Hi there!

I have 4GB of RAM, but the system is swapping A LOT. I think I will have
to go to 64 bit, but I need some time for that, and I need to use the
system in the meantime.

But: free -m shows only 2787 MB of total memory. I know I cannot use all
the 4G, but shouldn't there be at least 3GB or even a little more
available? What is your output of free -m?

wonko@weird ~ $ zgrep HIGHMEM /proc/config.gz
# CONFIG_NOHIGHMEM is not set
CONFIG_HIGHMEM4G=y
# CONFIG_HIGHMEM64G is not set
CONFIG_HIGHMEM=y
# CONFIG_DEBUG_HIGHMEM is not set

Wonko



Probably your graphicscard uses the rest of the memory.

Johannes Kimmel

Johannes Kimmel writes:

> On 06/02/2010 03:27 PM, Alex Schuster wrote:

> > But: free -m shows only 2787 MB of total memory. I know I cannot use
> > all the 4G, but shouldn't there be at least 3GB or even a little
> > more available? What is your output of free -m?
[...]

> Probably your graphicscard uses the rest of the memory.

Oh, thanks! Did not think about this. It's an ATI Radeon HD4300 onboard
card, so I guess this must be the cause. Seems like I will have to do the
migration to 64bit then.

Wonko

On Wednesday 02 June 2010 16:00:02 Alex Schuster wrote:
> Johannes Kimmel writes:
> > On 06/02/2010 03:27 PM, Alex Schuster wrote:
> > > But: free -m shows only 2787 MB of total memory. I know I cannot use
> > > all the 4G, but shouldn't there be at least 3GB or even a little
> > > more available? What is your output of free -m?
>
> [...]
>
> > Probably your graphicscard uses the rest of the memory.
>
> Oh, thanks! Did not think about this. It's an ATI Radeon HD4300 onboard
> card, so I guess this must be the cause. Seems like I will have to do the
> migration to 64bit then.
>
> Wonko
>

Wonko,

If your graphics card uses up the rest of the memory, moving up to 64bit won't
help either.

Check in your BIOS to see if you can reduce the amount your graphics card
uses. For 'normal' desktop use, around 64MB should be more then sufficient and
if you have 4GB physically in your system you should then see more memory
appear.

--
Joost Roeleveld

J. Roeleveld writes:

> > > Probably your graphicscard uses the rest of the memory.
> >
> > Oh, thanks! Did not think about this. It's an ATI Radeon HD4300
> > onboard card, so I guess this must be the cause. Seems like I will
> > have to do the migration to 64bit then.

> Wonko,
>
> If your graphics card uses up the rest of the memory, moving up to
> 64bit won't help either.

Shouldn't I have 4GB minus the amount of graphics memory then, instead of
3G minus that?
But I plan to add more memory anyway. With at least 6GB, and better 8GB,
the graphics memory will not matter that much then. But I have to go to a
64bit system for this.

> Check in your BIOS to see if you can reduce the amount your graphics
> card uses. For 'normal' desktop use, around 64MB should be more then
> sufficient and if you have 4GB physically in your system you should
> then see more memory appear.

Good idea! Thanks, I will have a look there.

BTW, this is part of my lshw output:
*-display
description: VGA compatible controller
product: Radeon HD 3200 Graphics
vendor: ATI Technologies Inc
physical id: 5
bus info: pci@0000:01:05.0
version: 00
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
configuration: driver=fglrx_pci latency=0
resources: irq:18 memory:d0000000-dfffffff(prefetchable)
ioport:ee00(size=256) memory:fdfe0000-fdfeffff memory:fde00000-fdefffff

d0000000-dfffffff is 255M, fde00000-fdefffff is 1M. So I lose 1/4 G for
graphics memory.

Wonko

On Wed, 2 Jun 2010 17:48:28 +0200, Alex Schuster wrote:

> > If your graphics card uses up the rest of the memory, moving up to
> > 64bit won't help either.
>
> Shouldn't I have 4GB minus the amount of graphics memory then, instead
> of 3G minus that?

Some BIOSes only show a maximum of 3GB with the default settings. ISTR
it's something to do with mapping PCI address space over the last GB. I
had to change a BIOS option to see all 4GB on my system.


--
Neil Bothwick

There is absolutely no substitute for a genuine lack of preparation.