[Solved] not seeing all my Memory on 14.x x86

[aus9]

Hi

I did not even check until now what TC32 was seeing or giving me. I have made my dmesg a clickable text file link
https://www.mediafire.com/file/44qv22n8egdxp0a/32dmesg.txt
I would normally try a dropbox link but its not working for me at the moment...impatience is a virtue

the key thing is on TC64

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free -g says I have a total of 6G and 5G available

here is the TC32 output

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free -g
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:              1           1           0           0           0           0
Swap:             8           0           8
tc@box:~$
htop shows one memory hog is firefox which spawns multiple instances. Thats not normally problem if my sytem thought I had total of 6G

I only discovered today after building some GUI packages....and getting a memory allocation error.

thanks for reading.

PS I am aware that 32 bit may have a 3G limit but where is all my precious RAM? 

[jazzbiker]

Hi aus9!

Haven't You tried Core64 configuration? It is 64-bit kernel supporting 32-bit userland. Some time ago when I was trying 32-bit TC on 64-bit machines I came to conclusion that this is much better way to run 32-bit apps on 64-bit machines.

[Rich]

Hi aus9
The  -g  option does not appear to be very accurate. Use  -m  instead.

This is from a machine with 4 Gbytes of RAM:

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tc@E310:~$ free -g
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:             2          1          1          0          0          0
-/+ buffers/cache:          1          1
Swap:            0          0          0
tc@E310:~$
tc@E310:~$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3028       1697       1331          0          4        414
-/+ buffers/cache:       1278       1750
Swap:          999         24        975
tc@E310:~$

[aus9]

Hi Rich
This is my result with a machine with 8G of RAM....confirmed on TC64 which is running on a different partition. So its not the bios nor loose sticks

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tc@box:~$ free -m
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            942         164         651          35         127         626
Swap:          8000           0        8000
tc@box:~$
I do not care if I only see 3 but 1 is not enough for me

Hi jazzbiker

No I had not.  Does that affect any TCE submission?

[Rich]

Hi aus9
Run:

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dmesg > dmesg.txtand attach the file to your next post.

[aus9]

Hi Rich

Just been back on TC64 and the key thing to me is
on TC64 dmesg | grep Memory has 6006032/6215008k available

now here is TC32 and my dmesg

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dmesg | grep Memory
Memory: 952388K/985184K available (6664K kernel code, 866K rwdata, 1832K rodata, 732K init, 400K bss, 32796K reserved, 0K cma-reserved, 87196K highmem)
tc@box:~$
PS I just tried a different web browser and no difference detected so its not a TCE it must be something else

Incidently I have an AMD APU which means my graphics comes from the CPU. In the bios I give it 2G of RAM so I will never see 8G in total
hope that helps

[CardealRusso]

I give it 2G of RAM

Hello. I once went through a similar situation. I assume these 2GB are used from the 4GB available to the system, not the remaining 4GB unallocated.

[Rich]

Hi aus9
I figured it out.
The following are the ranges of usable addresses for system RAM from dmesg.
I added the spaces to break up the addresses into groups of 4 digits.

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BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
BIOS-e820: [mem 0x0000 0000 0000 0000-0x0000 0000 0009 d3ff] usable
BIOS-e820: [mem 0x0000 0000 0010 0000-0x0000 0000 09d8 1fff] usable
BIOS-e820: [mem 0x0000 0000 0a00 0000-0x0000 0000 0a1f ffff] usable
BIOS-e820: [mem 0x0000 0000 0a20 b000-0x0000 0000 0aff ffff] usable
BIOS-e820: [mem 0x0000 0000 0b02 0000-0x0000 0000 3b32 3fff] usable
BIOS-e820: [mem 0x0000 0000 3ddf f000-0x0000 0000 3eff ffff] usable
BIOS-e820: [mem 0x0000 0001 0000 0000-0x0000 0002 3f33 ffff] usable
The first 6 address ranges add up to approximately 962 Mbytes.
The last address range is approximately 6069 Mbytes (~6 Gbytes).
With 32 bits the highest address you can access is  FFFF FFFF.

That last block of RAM uses addresses 1 0000 0000 through 2 3F33 FFFF
and is out of reach for a 32 bit address.

[Rich]

Hi aus9
I noticed one other thing:

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Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/grub/vmlinuz tce=sda4 home=sda4 waitusb=5 nozswap
Unknown kernel command line parameters "nozswap BOOT_IMAGE=/grub/vmlinuz tce=sda4 home=sda4 waitusb=5", will be passed to user space.
The  BOOT_IMAGE=/grub/vmlinuz  is probably incorrect. Your boot loader
is passing it to the kernel.

[jazzbiker]

Does that affect any TCE submission?

I suppose not. You use 32-bit extensions from x86 repo and any extension buit in Core64 mode will be 32-bit extension. In theory.
In practice I've submitted extensions a few and I did them for both x86 and x86_64 archs on the same machine. I've seen no reclamations concerning 32-bit versions. Probably because nobody use them :-) But I'm using them day by day.

[jazzbiker]

Hi aus9,

By the way it is interesting how much memory will give 64-bit kernel for 32-bit userspace on Your box with 6G installed and 2G allowed for graphics card. I bet for 4G.
Let's not forget that modules are 64-bit too.

[aus9]

Hi

I too have figured it out sorry to take so long. The real answer was hinted by  CardealRusso based on my AMD APU bios shared ram...which is not shared but reserved RAM

just then I gave my APU 512M and now I see before I LOAD hog=firefox

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free -m
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           2466         170        2145          35         152        2046
Swap:          8000           0        8000
some simple maths...total 2466 + 512 = 2978M which is close enough to the upper limit of a non-PAE 32 bit kernel.

Hi Rich

Please mark as solved. At your discretion change subject to
"members watch out for shared or reserved graphics RAM for x86 kernels"

Hi jazzbiker EDIT
I will not try a 64 bit kernel at this stage, see next post if interested

Hi Rich
That dir is correct.
I have MBR controlled by a debian distro.
It chainloads to the PBR for sda3 for TC64 bit such that

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sudo mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/sda3
tc@box:~$ ls /mnt/sda3
boot/ home/ tce/
for TC32, I was unable to get grub2-multi (OR systemrescue usb) to embed into PBR for boot/ under sda4 so I changed it to grub and use debian 40_custom menu to boot TC32
for those interested TC32 for me is

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ls /mnt/sda4
1builds/                   m13.fsa
1tinycore/                 m14.fsa
2023/                      mp3/
MBR.MBR                    mx-builds/
bookmarks-2023-07-31.json  tce/
grub/                      v6.fsa
home/                      voidlinux-files/
lost+found/
I will have to stop using firefox on TC32 unless I have display issues at certain sites like the tilda site I have already posted about...but not on TC32
thanks for reading

[aus9]

slightly offtopic to new subject but relevant to RAM usage

the internet says for firefox try this
Settings -> General -> Performance
untick use recommended
keep ticked HW acceleration

I ran htop before the change with 4 tabs open and total = 1.4G, that explains why I had a crash earlier
with new change current htop shows total of 684M

Thats enough for me to backtrack on using a 64 bit kernel on TC32, at this stage.

[jazzbiker]

Here are some opinions by Linus Torvalds concerning virtual and physical memory amounts: http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=76912&curpostid=76973

[aus9]

That's for link. I thought for a minute ot 2 PAE was an answer

My current setup is good enough. Jwm plus xorg plus some gtk3 apps plus firefox is around 700 megs