On Mon, 2 Feb 2004, Jimmy Wales wrote:
However, the two Pentium IV servers with 4 physical gig of RAM in them report only 3,584MB of RAM. I fiddled with the chips to confirm that each of them really is 1 Gig, and that's not it. I also poked around in the bios (in an uneducated manner), but saw nothing to fix.
Step away from the BIOS *grin* That is perfectly normal. Some chipsets "eat" 512M for PCI I/O space. That's where the memory went. Consult the motherboard manual for more. I would suggest leaving those machines at 3G instead of wasting 512M.
memtest86 will run overnight, and if (as I expect) all goes well, we will be ready for production tomorrow. If the machines can only recognize 3.5GB of RAM instead of 4, that isn't a joyful thing, but it really doesn't matter a LOT, I don't think.
They know it's there, but cannot map it into addressable space and still allow you to access I/O. The Linux highmem (>4G) might help but PAE (36bit mode) is a bit computationally expensive -- esp. for 80$ worth of memory(?).
--Ricky