Memory information

Khannie

Any way of determining if the memory in the box I'm using is ECC or standard without rebooting and checking the bios?

/proc/meminfo says:

MemTotal:      2074516 kB
MemFree:        432304 kB
Buffers:         43936 kB
Cached:         592756 kB
SwapCached:      31248 kB
Active:        1186868 kB
Inactive:       374448 kB
HighTotal:     1179092 kB
HighFree:        16512 kB
LowTotal:       895424 kB
LowFree:        415792 kB
SwapTotal:     2040244 kB
SwapFree:      1785464 kB
Dirty:             240 kB
Writeback:           0 kB
Mapped:        1001544 kB
Slab:            50224 kB
Committed_AS:  1851804 kB
PageTables:      11448 kB
VmallocTotal:   106488 kB
VmallocUsed:      3324 kB
VmallocChunk:   102608 kB
HugePages_Total:     0
HugePages_Free:      0
Hugepagesize:     2048 kB

It's a RHEL4 machine.

Thanks in advance.

Khannie

Heh...you're all rubbish.

Rebooted it. Pain in the bum doing so, as it's a shared machine. Sorted now anyway.

tomk

Couldn't you have googled the mobo make & model?

Capt'n Midnight

Or take off the lid and look inside ?

Khannie

Ended up taking the lid off. Conveniently the box is under my desk. (though it is a department shared machine...that's only because I'm nice )

It's a dell workstation. I went to their site and stuck in the tag number, but it wasn't very clear on the ol' ram front.

ObeyGiant

I find crucial.com invaluable for finding out what type of memory my $brand_name_workstation uses.

Capt'n Midnight

www.shop4memory.com has a web configurator thingy too.

in the windows word http://www.cpuid.com amongst other utils will report info back on SIMMS - so there must be an equilivant that uses "SPD"

Module(s) specification using SPD (Serial Presence Detect) : vendor, serial number, timings table.

Khannie

I used the shop4memory configurator....but the machine can take ECC or standard...so it was offering me both.

It arrived anyway....now I have a new problem.....

The bios correctly reports 4096MB now but the OS reports 3.5GB.

I'm running a 2.6 SMP kernel. Checked the back of the machine and the graphics aren't integrated, so I'm assuming it's using its own ram and not system ram.

/proc/meminfo confirms what the system monitor says....3.5GB.

Anyone got any ideas?

Capt'n Midnight

I'd guess it's OS related but try another OS to see what it says - use a Live CD or the PC's Diags disk. Also check out if there is a BIOS upgrade that lists stuff you need/want - if shared machine then probably best not to upgrade unless sure will solve probem. Check in BIOS for any strange settings re timing of ram banks - swap the ram so slower memory is in lower banks (straw clutching should not matter on a modern pc)

( had a bad experiance with an AMD motherboard where depending on the BIOS version you could enable Cache OR Hard Drives > 64GB but not both at the same time ! )

ressem

Server manual
"
Note: Memory between 4GB and 4GB minus 512MB will not
be accessible for use by the operating system and may be lost
to the user, because this area is reserved for BIOS, APIC
configuration space, PCI adapter interface, and virtual video
memory space. This means that if 4GB of memory is installed,
3.5GB of this memory is usable. The chipset should allow the
remapping of unused memory above the 4GB address, but
this memory may not be accessible to an operating system that
has a 4GB memory limit.
"

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;555458
suggests enabling PAE at the expense of performance, updating bios, or adding more momory.

Can you try an SMP or hugemem kernel, or build your own and add it to grub to try it out?
D'oh you're using SMP. PAE is meant to be in in the default enterprise SMP kernel.

Khannie

Thanks for the help lads.

It looks like reseem has it right with BIOS / PCI memory theft. Another machine we have reports only 3.75GB available.

I'll try a live cd just to be sure, but it's a shared machine, so reboots are avoided so it'll be a while.