Reclaiming lost RAM

Vivek J. Patankar list307 at gmail.com
Sat Nov 25 18:26:19 UTC 2006


Hello all.

	I am missing some of RAM from the total installed in my notebook. I 
noticed it is passing before but never paid any attention to it, but now 
I want to fix this problem. The notebook is an Acer Aspire 5004NWLMi 
with 512MB installed. Of that 32MB is reserved for Video. But Fedora 
sees only 401MB of the remaining. Going through the logs I came across 
this in dmesg...

   "Your BIOS doesn't leave a aperture memory hole
    Please enable the IOMMU option in the BIOS setup
    This costs you 64 MB of RAM
    Mapping aperture over 65536 KB of RAM @ 4000000
    Memory: 408804k/490432k available (2409k kernel code,
    81240k reserved, 1722k data, 204k init)"

	A bit of searching revealed that this problem has been discussed on 
this list before but in those cases there were BIOS settings needed to 
be changed. But the BIOS in this notebook (Phoenix NoteBIOS 4.0 Release 
6) is devoid of any configuration parameters other than passwords and 
video memory.

	Any ideas on how to reclaim this lost memory?

-- 
Regards
Vivek J. Patankar

Registered Linux User #374218
Fedora Core release 6 (Zod)
Linux 2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 x86_64




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