memory holes

[Erik Udo]

Yes, i got it working after having two memoy modules that match in bus 
speed.

But, i was wondering how BIOS had 512MB of ram. Shouldn't the speed and 
stuff be invisible to the OS? Or did i have bad memory?

Olivier Gautherot wrote:
> Hi Erik!
> 
> Mixing memory modules with different speeds is generally a dangerous thing to 
> do. I would strongly recommend you match them all. The fact that your 384MB 
> configuration worked is in no way a garantee that the 512MB config you 
> describe should work (I would even say that it is a miracle that it ever 
> worked in the first place). The problems you describe with the various *BSD 
> sound very much like soft errors - which may happen with out-of-spec bus 
> frequency.
> 
> Merry Christmas
> Olivier
> 
> On Saturday 23 December 2006 14:30, Erik Udo wrote:
>> OK. I've tested OpenBSD and NetBSD.
>>
>> Both find 512MB of ram, but..
>> NetBSD crashes after boot stage when it starts to load the kernel.
>> (thanks NetBSD team for not building the kernel image with debugging
>> symbols, but you did build it with DDB)
>>
>> OpenBSD finds 512MB of ram too, but...
>> it wont find my hard disk, even thought it has wd0 as a hard disk in dmesh.
>>
>> To add to my previous post, i tested with 128MB PC100 + 32MB PC100. Both
>> memory modules was found by FreeBSD and put to use.
>>
>> Which leads me to the conclusion: Why can't FreeBSD use PC133 memory
>> when OpenBSD can? Did someone forget to port drivers for memory modules? :P
>>
>> Erik Udo wrote:
>>> I upgraded my hardware and software yesturday, and for some reason,
>>> FreeBSD only 'detects' 128MB of the memory, when the BIOS is clearly
>>> seeing 512MB. OpenBSD also finds 512MB of memory.
>>>
>>> So i added one 128MB ECC memory. There was one 128MB PC100 and 256MB
>>> PC133 memory before, and it worked fine on 6.2-PRERELASE.
>>>
>>> Now that i upgraded to 6.2-RC1, from 6.2-PRERELEASE and added the 128MB
>>> memory to the 384MB i had, the kernel started giving me this error on
>>> the first line of the kernel output:
>>> "Too many holes in the physical address space, giving up"
>>>
>>> Now, i searched google for anything, and found this earlier thread:
>>> http://www.mail-archive.com/freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org/msg01624.html
>>>
>>> I also found this:
>>> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2005-October/013932.ht
>>> ml
>>>
>>> Like the previous post says, the memory was found after the increased
>>> PHYSMAP_SIZE. I increased mine to 2*32, later 2*128. It didn't work.
>>>
>>> Also someone told me to add this line to the kernel config:
>>> options         MAXMEM=524288
>>>
>>> That didn't work either.
>>>
>>> I also tried to toggle all the bios settings on the computer, i even
>>> upgraded the bios. Nothing.
>>>
>>> Now i found out that OpenBSD sees 512MB of memory, so there must be some
>>> kind of trick to make FreeBSD recognize that memory too.
>>>
>>> Here is some output of my verbose boot:
>>>
>>> with 512MB:
>>> real memory  = 134234112 (128 MB)
>>> Physical memory chunk(s):
>>> 0x0000000000001000 - 0x000000000009efff, 647168 bytes (158 pages)
>>> 0x0000000000100000 - 0x00000000003fffff, 3145728 bytes (768 pages)
>>> 0x0000000000c25000 - 0x0000000007d82fff, 118874112 bytes (29022 pages)
>>> avail memory = 121798656 (116 MB)
>>>
>>> Anyone have any ideas?
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Erik
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> freebsd-hardware at freebsd.org mailing list
>>> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware
>>> To unsubscribe, send any mail to
>>> "freebsd-hardware-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>> _______________________________________________
>> freebsd-hardware at freebsd.org mailing list
>> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware
>> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-hardware-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>