Asus A8V Deluxe Can't see full 4GB

[Per Steinar Iversen]

On Wed, 7 Dec 2005, John Morris wrote:

> On Tue, 2005-12-06 at 14:31, tweeks wrote:
>
>> I've got a guy running an Asus A8V Deluxe w/Ath64 3000+ and 4 sticks of 1GB
>> and his setup (with either RH-EL3 64bit or RH-EL4 64bit) seems to be
>> exhibiting the classic x86/32bit problem of not being able to map the memory
>> around the 512MB PCI memory/chipset mapping.  I'm not sure about the 2.4
>> kernel, but I would think that the 2.6 64bit kernel (or the motherboard)
>> could map that memory high (beyond the 32 bit range) to access all 4GB, but
>> nothing stands out on how I should go about doing this (BIOS seems void of
>> any such "settings", and I know of no OS/kernel (sysctl) parameters that can
>> do this).
>
> Look in your manual, my version 3 copy says, on page 4-17, that it has
> an option "DRAM Over 4G Remapping" that defaults to disabled.  My
> machine only has a pair of 1GB sticks in it currently so I can't test
> it.  Would like to know if I'd get 4GB instead of 3.5GB so could ya
> report back?

I got one of these with 4GB RAM. If the remapping option is turned on 
nearly everything works, apart from the ethernet. Depending on the kernel 
the network either just does not work or the kernel emits large numbers of 
errors on the console, complaining about some IRQ problem (it is hard to 
read the messages as they scroll very rapidly). The network card on my 
machine is:

00:0a.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8001 Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 13)

It is not clear to me if this is a driver problem or intrinsic to this 
design. When running with less memory available the machine is very 
pleasant and stable.

-psi