freebsd stable - Jan 2018 - i386 with 4GB RAM: less than 2GB available on A2SAV (Intel Atom E3940)

28.01.2018 21:57, Andre Albsmeier wrote:
> I have a lot of machines running with 4 GB physical RAM and, for
> some reasons, I still have to use a 32 bits OS.
> 
> All of them show something between 3 and 3.5 GB of RAM available
> in dmesg but the brand new Supermicro A2SAV really shocked me:
> 
> FreeBSD 11.1-STABLE #0: Mon Jan 15 06:57:10 CET 2018
> ...
> real memory  = 4294967296 (4096 MB)
> avail memory = 1939558400 (1849 MB)
> ...
> 
> So do people have any ideas how I might get a bit closer to at least
> 3 GB? I assume there are no FreeBSD knobs which might help but hope
> dies last...
First, try to decrease amount of RAM dedicated to integrated video, if any (BIOS
Setup).

Also, I'd like to know reasons that made you stick to 32 bit OS
as we have pretty good support for 32 bit applications running under 64 bit
system.

On Sun, 28-Jan-2018 at 22:51:04 +0700, Eugene Grosbein
wrote:
> 28.01.2018 21:57, Andre Albsmeier wrote:
> 
> > I have a lot of machines running with 4 GB physical RAM and, for
> > some reasons, I still have to use a 32 bits OS.
> > 
> > All of them show something between 3 and 3.5 GB of RAM available
> > in dmesg but the brand new Supermicro A2SAV really shocked me:
> > 
> > FreeBSD 11.1-STABLE #0: Mon Jan 15 06:57:10 CET 2018
> > ...
> > real memory  = 4294967296 (4096 MB)
> > avail memory = 1939558400 (1849 MB)
> > ...
> > 
> > So do people have any ideas how I might get a bit closer to at least
> > 3 GB? I assume there are no FreeBSD knobs which might help but hope
> > dies last...
> 
> First, try to decrease amount of RAM dedicated to integrated video, if any
(BIOS Setup).
Done that. I have set everything as small as possible but this didn't help.
After a BIOS upgrade, I found the promising option

MAX TOLUD

which was set to 2GB. I changed it to 3GB but nothing changed.
> 
> Also, I'd like to know reasons that made you stick to 32 bit OS
> as we have pretty good support for 32 bit applications running under 64 bit
system.
I (still) have 32 bit machines and don't want to maintain 2 userlands.
Each machine has its own kernel but userland (updated via nfs) must
remain 32 bit.

Or is it possible to boot a 64 bit kernel and have everything else in
32 bit?