Posts Tagged ‘detects’

Why and how to fix when Debian Linux detects and shows only 3GB of memory even though 4 or more are present

Saturday, September 8th, 2012

I was quite shocked to find out free -m was showing 3GB of memory on a brand new purchased Lenovo ThinkCentre Edge71 (according to guarantee paper with 4GB). I got angry seeing this, I paid 350 EUR for a Desktop host and suddenly, there is one giga less …

Since I was not sure if by mistake someome shipped the system with 1 Gigabyte or there is something wrong with Linux unable to detect the whole amount of memory I entered BIOS (on Lenovo ThinkCentre Edge series – to enter BIOS press F1.

Interestingly in BIOS, I can see 4 GigaBytes of memory are present, well this was puzzling … :

Lenovo ThinkCentre Edge71 esktop PC BIOS picture

Still free -m show me 3GB:

# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2989 186 2803 0 4 76

-/+ buffers/cache: 105 2884
Swap: 5651 0 5651

I checked also in top and htop, hoping maybe there 4 Gigas will show up but nope there also the whole amount of system memory was identified as 2989 MB.

I thought for a while and my first thought was probably, the memory is not detected because there might be integrated Videocard configured to use 1 GB of RAM. So next logical thing to do was check in BIOS, what kind of settings are set for the Video adapter.

possible settings for Video Setup menu are:

IGD,
PEG,
or AUTO

PEG stands for (PCI-e Graphics Device
– IDG is abbreviaton from (Internal Graphics Device)
I give a try to all of them, but I didn’t see any change in amount of detected memory. Debian Squeeze Linux 6.0.5 was always detecting 2989 max memory. I also tried also changing the amount of IGD Pre-allocated Memory Size from 128M to 32MB as well as decreasing the amount of Total Graphics Memory to 128MB. Unfortunately doing all kind of changes didn’t influenced the amount of detected memory by Linux kernel …

To make sure the 3GB detected memory is not because of some Debian Squeeze GNU / Linux bug I tried using a PuppyLinux 4.2.1 LiveCD just to see PuppyLinux was also detecting with 1 GIGA less…

Onwards after a quick research online I red people are experiencing similar problems on Linux, whether a 32 Bit kernel is used on 64 bit machines.
Weirdly it seems 32 Bit Linux kernels (even the new ones) are having troubles detecting more than 3GB of memory, but there is a need for some kind of bigmem supporting kernel .
Here is the exact Linux kernel version making the troubles:

# uname -a;Linux pcfreak 2.6.32-5-686 #1 SMP Sun May 6 04:01:19 UTC 2012 i686 GNU/Linux

Until checking the kernel release, I didn’t realized in the hurry installed a 32 bit version of Debian on the 64 bit machine so to fix up the situation installed 64 bit version kernel;

# apt-get install --yes linux-image-2.6.32-5-amd64

And Hooray! After restarting and booting with the new 64 bit (amd64) kernel, the missing 1 Gigabyte of memory started being detected:

# uname -a;
Linux pcfreak 2.6.32-5-amd64 #1 SMP Sun May 6 05:12:07 UTC 2012 x86_64 GNU/Linux
# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3913 261 3651 0 4 71
-/+ buffers/cache: 186 3727
Swap: 5651 0 5651

Seeing system boot up fine with the amd64 bit kernel, I removed the old 32 bit kernel, e.g.:

# apt-get --yes remove linux-image-2.6.32-5-686

Well that’s all folks 🙂