"The Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

Seeing only 13M of RAM

From Leon Vismer on Sun, 04 Jul 1999

Howdey James,

I know that you have answered the question regarding how to get Linux see 128M RAM before, however I still just get linux to see about 13M of RAM (13M is what the command top and procinfo display) where I have 128M installed on the machine.

Some machine details: Pentium II 350 with an EPOX motherboard and 128M 100MHZ RAM, running Redhat 6.0 with kernel 2.2.5. I use lilo to boot and I include a snippet from the lilo.conf

>        image=/boot/vmlinuz
                    ....
>                    append="ram=128M"
>                    read-only

Any ideas from your side would be greatly appreciated.
Regards
Leon Vismer

It sounds like your system is "seeing" (using) all 128Mb of RAM and that you are probably must misreading the output from 'top' and/or 'procinfo'

Here's an excerpt from 'procinfo' on one of my systems:

Linux 2.2.0 (root@canopus) (gcc 2.7.2.1) #8 [canopus.(none)]

Memory:      Total        Used        Free      Shared     Buffers      Cached
Mem:         63200       61304        1896       25688        3940       13192
Swap:       104416           0      104416

Note that it lists 63200 as my total memory (this is a 64Mb system.

Here's a screen shot from the top of a 'top' session (cut using the 'screen' cut and paste features):

3:27am  up 4 days, 18:04,  8 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
57 processes: 55 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 1 stopped
CPU states:  0.9% user,  1.1% system,  0.0% nice, 98.0% idle
Mem:   63092K av,  61224K used,   1868K free,  39184K shrd,   1384K buff
Swap: 231276K av,  24800K used, 206476K free                 16788K cached

This is another 64Mb system.

If you really aren't seeing more than 13Mb (more likely to be 16Mb actually) on your system then you may want to double check your CMOS settings and consider testing the hardware using some other OS.

The append= directive should no longer be necessary with newer (2.2.x and later) kernels. However, you didn't mention which kernel you're using and specifying a correct value won't hurt.

Copyright © 1999, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 44 August 1999

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