Martin Marques wrote:
John R Pierce wrote:
but thats neither here nor there, PAE is a universal issue for any
x86 32bit system with 4GB+ ram, with PAE disabled, the BIOS, PCI, AGP
or PCI-express, etc IO spaces consume anywheres from .5 to 1GB of the
32bit address space. PAE is a hardware workaround implemented in
pretty much all Intel and AMD CPUs made in the last 5+ years, and
allows the OS to access more than 4GB of physical address space. PAE
introduces some hardware overhead because it involves larger page
tables and another level of indirection in the TLB lookups.
CentOS 5 installs defaults to PAE off because there are some systems
where PAE is crash-happy. Someone here has already explained how to
enable PAE and in fact the original poster tried it and is happy with
his full 4GB now.
Well, looks like I'm having quite a bit of a problem then. :-(
I have PAE kernel running, and all I see is 3.2Gb of the 4Gb.
dmidecode gives me this (intel chip):
Handle 0x0000, DMI type 0, 20 bytes.
BIOS Information
Vendor: Intel Corp.
Version: EV91510A.86A.0482.2006.0222.2350
....
Any ideas on why I can't see all 4Gb?
Could be an issue with the ASPI information being provided by the system
BIOS. The missing 700MB or so of memory is at a high physical address
somewhere, its up to the BIOS to tell the OS where this is.
according to that BIOS identifier code in your DMI data, your board is a
Intel Desktop D9150GEV or its cousins, and you have BIOS version 0482,
which is the last version
(see http://support.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/sb/cs-010639.htm)
per the technical product specification for those boards,
http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/d915gev/sb/c6860201.pdf
PAE may not be supported.
it doesn't say that explicitly, however, section 2.2.1 on page 51 says ...
The board utilizes 4 GB of addressable system memory. Typically the
address space that is
allocated for PCI Conventional bus add-in cards, PCI Express
configuration space, BIOS
(firmware hub), and chipset overhead resides above the top of DRAM
(total system memory). On
a system that has 4 GB of system memory installed, it is not possible to
use all of the installed
memory due to system address space being allocated for other system
critical functions. These
functions include the following:
• BIOS/firmware hub (2 MB)
• Local APIC (19 MB)
• Digital Media Interface (40 MB)
• Front side bus interrupts (17 MB)
• PCI Express configuration space (256 MB)
• MCH base address registers, internal graphics ranges, PCI Express
ports (up to 512 MB)
• Memory-mapped I/O that is dynamically allocated for PCI Conventional
and PCI Express add-in cards.
this implies that the 'overlapping' memory is NOT relocated to a higher
address. This was a rather low end desktop board from circa 2004,
intended strictly to support Win2000/XP in 32bit mode. with the P4 500
and 600 series CPUs and onboard Intel shared memory graphics.
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