Fedora Core 6 not recognizing all of my memory

[Vivek J. Patankar]

Tim wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-12-29 at 20:50 +0530, Vivek J. Patankar wrote:
>> I have a similar problem with my laptop (410MB detected instead of 
>> 512MB) and dmesg told me why. I still haven't found a resolution to it
>> though.
> The first obvious thing that springs to mind:  RAM being divided between
> some for the graphics card and the rest for the system.

Umm... not exactly.
The actual installed RAM is 512M. 490432K is what is left after the 
graphics card takes it's share. Yet only 408804K is available for Fedora.
This is what dmesg told me.

   "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 and the hardware involved were servers. But the BIOS in this 
notebook (Phoenix NoteBIOS 4.0 Release 6) is devoid of any configuration 
parameters other than passwords and video memory.
The laptop is an Acer Aspire 5004NWLMi.


-- 
Regards
Vivek J. Patankar

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