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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mira.net.au!vic.news.telstra.net!act.news.telstra.net!psgrain!news.uoregon.edu!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!uwm.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!jussieu.fr!oleane!tank.news.pipex.net!pipex!news.mathworks.com!newscaster-1.mcast.net!informatik.uni-bremen.de!cs.tu-berlin.de!uni-erlangen.de!news.tu-chemnitz.de!irz401!orion.sax.de!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: FreeBSD 2.? and Physical Memory > 64 mb Date: 15 Jun 1996 19:34:05 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 26 Message-ID: <4pv37d$84e@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <31C25486.41C6@onthenet.com.au> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E Tony Griffiths <tonyg@onthenet.com.au> wrote: > Apologies if this question has been answered before... It has. It's in the FAQ. Either http://www.freebsd.org/..., or file://usr/share/doc/FAQ/. 8.6. I have 128 MB of RAM but it seems that the system use only the first 64 MB. What's going on ? Due to the manner in which FreeBSD gets the memory size from the BIOS, it can only detect 16 bits worth of Kbytes in size (65535 Kbytes = 64MB). If you have more than 64MB, FreeBSD will only see the first 64MB. To work around this problem, you need to use the kernel option specified below. There is a way to get complete memory information from the BIOS, but we don't have room in the bootblocks to do it. Someday when lack of room in the bootblocks is fixed, we'll use the extended BIOS functions to get the full memory information...but for now we're stuck with the kernel option. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)