Re: 4GB memory and Intel Dual-Core system

From: Alejandro Bonilla
Date: Thu Oct 27 2005 - 17:14:13 EST


On Thu, 27 Oct 2005 18:05:33 -0400, Dave Jones wrote
> 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.

True, probably AMD added a "workaround" for this problem, but by nature, this
is what happens.
>
> I suspect a lot of the lower-end (and older) boards however don't
> have this option, as they were not tested with 4GB.

Probably no Intel boards have the option. So, it would be that Marcel contact
Intel so they can add a mapping option on the BIOS for this situation. It is
somehow missleading.

.Alejandro

>
> Dave


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