Arch Linux

ManOnONeWheel

Member

Registered: 2008-01-11

Posts: 25

4gb not showing up in Arch64

Hi all.

I finally installed Arch64 to take advantage of my 4gb of RAM and my Core 2 Duo. But I am having some problems. I don't think Arch sees all of it. It should not be a hardware problem because my BIOS correctly displays 4 gb. I left my 32-bit Arch on another partition and it actually sees more than Arch64.

Here is my meminfo under Arch64

  
$ cat /proc/meminfo 
MemTotal:      2996504 kB
MemFree:       2856492 kB
Buffers:          7852 kB
Cached:          63932 kB
SwapCached:          0 kB
Active:          59900 kB
Inactive:        51180 kB
SwapTotal:     4249152 kB
SwapFree:      4249152 kB
Dirty:             220 kB
Writeback:           0 kB
AnonPages:       39476 kB
Mapped:          19176 kB
Slab:            11872 kB
SReclaimable:     6888 kB
SUnreclaim:       4984 kB
PageTables:       2792 kB
NFS_Unstable:        0 kB
Bounce:              0 kB
CommitLimit:   5747404 kB
Committed_AS:    51408 kB
VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB
VmallocUsed:      2260 kB
VmallocChunk: 34359736099 kB

And here is my meminfo under 32-bit arch

$ cat /proc/meminfo 
MemTotal:      3115920 kB
MemFree:       2951104 kB
Buffers:          7640 kB
Cached:          91980 kB
SwapCached:          0 kB
Active:          65716 kB
Inactive:        71328 kB
HighTotal:     2228032 kB
HighFree:      2086300 kB
LowTotal:       887888 kB
LowFree:        864804 kB
SwapTotal:     4249152 kB
SwapFree:      4249152 kB
Dirty:             228 kB
Writeback:           0 kB
AnonPages:       37276 kB
Mapped:          22288 kB
Slab:             8352 kB
SReclaimable:     4420 kB
SUnreclaim:       3932 kB
PageTables:        988 kB
NFS_Unstable:        0 kB
Bounce:              0 kB
CommitLimit:   5807112 kB
Committed_AS:    88664 kB
VmallocTotal:   116728 kB
VmallocUsed:     45044 kB
VmallocChunk:    66036 kB

Just for kicks, I took out one stick and both Arch64 and 32-bit see the same 3 gb.

Any ideas?

AndyRTR

Developer

From: Magdeburg/Germany

Registered: 2005-10-07

Posts: 1,642

Re: 4gb not showing up in Arch64

please check/post dmesg output.

iBertus

Member

From: Greenville, NC

Registered: 2004-11-04

Posts: 2,228

Re: 4gb not showing up in Arch64

What type of motherboard/chipset are you using?

ManOnONeWheel

Member

Registered: 2008-01-11

Posts: 25

Re: 4gb not showing up in Arch64

Its an MSI P6N Platnium with an Nvidia 650i chipset.

I looked through the dmesg and I found one line that seems to indicate the problem.

WARNING: BIOS bug: CPU MTRRs don't cover all of memory, losing 1024MB of RAM.

So I guess this means I have to update the BIOS, according to this thread.
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1164174

I have never had to update a BIOS before, but all the how-to's require either a floppy drive, or a Windows installation, of which I have neither.  I could install XP in a pinch and run the BIOS update utility but I really don't want to have to do that.

ManOnONeWheel

Member

Registered: 2008-01-11

Posts: 25

Re: 4gb not showing up in Arch64

Yep, I flashed the BIOS with the latest version and now I have all 4 gigs.

iBertus

Member

From: Greenville, NC

Registered: 2004-11-04

Posts: 2,228

Re: 4gb not showing up in Arch64

I find that having one of the PE type windows boot discs (BartPE for example) is really handy for BIOS updates. So, is this issue solved? If so, please mark the thread.