Re: small memory machine, large reserved memory

From: Tim Connors (tconnors@astro.swin.edu.au)
Date: Sun Dec 01 2002 - 04:07:10 EST


On Sun, 3 Nov 2002, William Lee Irwin III wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 04, 2002 at 01:10:36PM +1100, Tim Connors wrote:
> > In light of the recent discussions about config_tiny, etc, I decided to
> > install 2.4.19 on my old 8MB 486, to see whether it performed any better
> > than my previous attempts with 2.2.* and 2.4.*
> > The strange thing is, the memory init line at bootup (eg Memory:
> > 255296k/261996k available (1584k kernel code, 5972k reserved, 1353k data
> > , 108k init, 0k highmem)) says that only about 5 or 6MB are availabel,
> > with a whopping 2.x MB reserved. I have done a web search, and the only
> > answer I have come up with is that the top 384kb of the 1MB lower
> > portion of RAM should be here, but what else could be eating up all my
> > RAM?
> > There is nothgin suspicious in the BIOS - all BIOS and video caching is
> > turned off. The machine only (natually) has ISA slots in it, most are
> > empty. What else could possibly be wrong?
> > Is there something I can hack in the kernel to get it to use that, or can
> > anyone give me pointers as to what else I can change? I would really love
> > to regain that 2MB - its a pain when the shell gets swapped out after
> > doing an `ls` :)
>
> How does 2.5.44 (or 2.5.x-bk) do?

Okie dokie. Finally booted it and remembered to record the dmesg.

Is attached.

So any idea's on who is stealing my 2 Megs RAM? BIOS's fault?

-- 
TimC -- http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/staff/tconnors/

-o) /\\ The penguins are coming... _\_v the penguins are coming...


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