*BSD News Article 82073


Return to BSD News archive

Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!news.syd.connect.com.au!news.bri.connect.com.au!fjholden.OntheNet.com.au!news
From: Tony Griffiths <tonyg@OntheNet.com.au>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: FreeBSD memory limits??
Date: Sat, 02 Nov 1996 13:30:26 +1000
Organization: On the Net (ISP on the Gold Coast, Australia)
Lines: 29
Message-ID: <327AC052.4A3D@OntheNet.com.au>
References: <32796D8E.33E8@dowco.com>
Reply-To: tonyg@OntheNet.com.au
NNTP-Posting-Host: swanee.nt.com.au
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (WinNT; I)
To: "David K. Phinney" <dphinney@dowco.com>

David K. Phinney wrote:
> 
> We run FreeBSD 2.1.5-RELEASE on an HP Pentium 75. The machine has 80MB
> of RAM,
> but during bootup, freebsd only reports `67108864 (65536K bytes)' real
> memory.
> Could someone explain to me what's going on? Please respond also by
> email if
> possible.
>
Sure...  The problem is related to the way FreeBSD determines memory by
reading the # of KB from the BIOS location.  This is only 2 bytes long
and so the 65536 KB limitation.  You need to override this number by an
explicit MAXMEM setting in you kernel config file.  Eg.

options		"MAXMEM=81920"		# 80MB Ram in 1KB chunks
 
> Thanks,
> 
> David Phinney
> dowco.com network services
> --
> class davidPhinney {
> public:
>     char        *dphinney@dowco.com (const char *);
>     void        http://www.dowco.com/~dphinney ();
> };

Tony