command "free -b"

[Aaron Konstam]

On Fri, 2007-07-20 at 09:13 +0200, Joachim Backes wrote:
> reading the man page of the command free with option -b:
> 
>    The  -b  switch  displays  the amount of memory in bytes
> 
> But: I have 2 Gigbyte memory machine, and the command "free -b" displays 2109034496.
> But (((2109034496/1024)/1024)/1024) is not the integer 2.
> 
> Can somebody explain this? BIOS effect?
Why don't you do: free -m and free -g and maybe it will become clearer.
I have 1g ram and :
free -g gives me:

free -g
             total       used       free     shared    buffers
cached
Mem:             0          0          0          0          0
0
-/+ buffers/cache:          0          0
Swap:            1          0          1


and:
free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers
cached
Mem:          1010        751        258          0         36
420
-/+ buffers/cache:        294        716
Swap:         1913          0       1913

as you can see something is lost from the memory size.