hi,

I am having my system set up and running However when I ran the system monitor - it said that I've got only 2.9GB of RAM, but I know that I've got 4Gigs. Bios aslo sais that I've got 4Gigs of physical RAM but only 3Gigs is usable. Is it ok or I can make debian use 4 Gigs somehow?

I've also checked that when I run over 2.9 Gigs in Houdini - the system starts caching the data on hdd, so it seems like the system does us only 2.9 gigs (and does it run RAM in dual mode, I wonder?)

Thanks.

Check out this post. It comes with the territory…

http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-amd64/2005-Jan/0107.html [lists.suse.com]

Cheers,

J.C.

ok, I played a little bit with BIOS settings (enabled the memory hole or whatever it is) and now debian can use 3.9Gigs, so I think I can be almost happy with that.

Wait, I read that link and… are they saying that you basically can't have a x86 64-bit workstation today (as opposed to headless server) and make use of more than ~4GB RAM? That can't be right, can it? :?

Or do they mean that the gfx hardware will just require some of that RAM, so that if you had, say 8GB, it would show 7.9 or whatever.. ?

No, they're not saying that. They're saying that some of your memory won't be available to you depending on what mboard you're using. You can still get an 8G system and have more than 3G…I don't know how much offhand but let's say 7G. I see this as one of those teething pain issues as 64 starts to move into the mainstream. Eventually it will go away, plus the newer boards have workarounds, as MAD attests to.

Also, that article was from last year, don't forget. My guess is by end of this year you won't even hear about it with new systems and OS's.

Cheers,

J.C.

I see, thanks for clarifying that JC.