Re: small memory machine, large reserved memory

[William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>]

On Mon, Nov 04, 2002 at 01:10:36PM +1100, Tim Connors wrote:
> In light of the recent discussions about config_tiny, etc, I decided to
> install 2.4.19 on my old 8MB 486, to see whether it performed any better
> than my previous attempts with 2.2.* and 2.4.*
> The strange thing is, the memory init line at bootup (eg Memory:
> 255296k/261996k available (1584k kernel code, 5972k reserved, 1353k data
> , 108k init, 0k highmem)) says that only about 5 or 6MB are availabel,
> with a whopping 2.x MB reserved. I have done a web search, and the only
> answer I have come up with is that the top 384kb of the 1MB lower
> portion of RAM should be here, but what else could be eating up all my
> RAM?
> There is nothgin suspicious in the BIOS - all BIOS and video caching is
> turned off. The machine only (natually) has ISA slots in it, most are
> empty. What else could possibly be wrong?
> Is there something I can hack in the kernel to get it to use that, or can
> anyone give me pointers as to what else I can change? I would really love
> to regain that 2MB - its a pain when the shell gets swapped out after
> doing an `ls` :)

How does 2.5.44 (or 2.5.x-bk) do?


Bill