Re: Intel-Quad on GA-P35-S3 motherboard with 4*2GB

From: Wojciech Kromer
Date: Wed Sep 19 2007 - 05:28:56 EST



It's Intel-quad, so there are 4 CPUs.

Weird. The message about the MTRR on all the CPUs not maching sound
like a strange bios bug. Are you running the latest bios version?
See the story below.
Looks to match the MTRR setup at least. So how much ram does the kernel
actually want to use?

a)With mem=8GB parameter I had:

#free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 6473 474 5999 0 29 278


b) Without mem=8GM system slows down while booting and sometimes restart...


==== So the story begins ===========================

It's strange GIGABYTE missinformation, but:
- my board came with F2 release
- after detecting memory problem, I've upgraded it to F4 (latest at this moment)
- next day came with F5 release ,
there was only one info: "Fix PS2 keyboard compatibility issues",
so I decided *not* to upgrade BIOS

But yesterday I've finally upgraded to F5 release.
... and here is *surrprise*: MTRR changed to:

#cat /proc/mtrr
reg00: base=0x00000000 ( 0MB), size=4096MB: write-back, count=1
reg01: base=0xc0000000 (3072MB), size=1024MB: uncachable, count=1
reg02: base=0xa0000000 (2560MB), size= 512MB: uncachable, count=1
reg03: base=0x100000000 (4096MB), size=4096MB: write-back, count=1
reg04: base=0x200000000 (8192MB), size=2048MB: write-back, count=1
reg05: base=0x260000000 (9728MB), size= 512MB: uncachable, count=1
reg06: base=0x9ff00000 (2559MB), size= 1MB: write-through, count=1

Now there are no complains about MTRR in dmesg.

E820 seems to be the same:

BIOS-e820: 0000000000000000 - 000000000009f800 (usable)
BIOS-e820: 000000000009f800 - 00000000000a0000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 00000000000f0000 - 0000000000100000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 0000000000100000 - 000000009fee0000 (usable)
BIOS-e820: 000000009fee0000 - 000000009fee3000 (ACPI NVS)
BIOS-e820: 000000009fee3000 - 000000009fef0000 (ACPI data)
BIOS-e820: 000000009fef0000 - 000000009ff00000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 00000000c0000000 - 00000000c4000000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 00000000fec00000 - 0000000100000000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 0000000100000000 - 0000000260000000 (usable)

And finally I have my 8GB working without any kernel parameter,

# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 7988 1120 6868 0 88 612

Now i need to rerun memory tests.
Thank you for helping me with this stuff.


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