8GB ram installed, but only using 3.5GB (FreeBSD 7.1 AMD64)

M

matthew

Installed FreeBSD 7.1 AMD64 on a system with 8GB ram, when boot, BIOS shows 8192MB ram installed, but for some reason in FreeBSD I can't get it to use more than 3.5GB.

I tested the ram sticks on another machine, they worked fine, the only PCI card on the motherboard is an Intel NIC.

I also did some googling and tried different combinations of memory hole settings in BIOS, none of them helped, FreeBSD is still using only 3.5GB ram.

Any ideas?
 
do you use generic kernel? (I'm not 101% sure, but i think generic is for i386 only, meaning max ram 4GB unless PAE enabled in custom kernel)
Or custom kernel for amd64?
 
killasmurf86 said:
do you use generic kernel? (I'm not 101% sure, but i think generic is for i386 only, meaning max ram 4GB unless PAE enabled in custom kernel)
Or custom kernel for amd64?
Click to expand...

It's on a custom kernel, based on a copy of the default /usr/src/sys/amd64/conf/GENERIC.
 
argh, problem solved.

I had "options MAXMEM" in the kernel config, it was copied from a previous config on another machine that had weird issues with 4GB ram on an ASUS motherboard.

Removed options MAXMEM, recompiled, now FreeBSD is showing 8GB :)
 
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