fc1_x86_64 preview on tyan thunder k8w (S2885ANRF REV .03)

[Joshua Baker-LePain]

On Thu, 11 Dec 2003 at 4:56pm, Thomas Dodd wrote

> Alan Cox wrote:

> > Thats different. You end up needing some mappings for kernel and user
> > space to be efficient when dealing with user mappings. Whether you can
> > get your .5Gb back depends if the chipset can remap it higher up in memory
> > so that the 3.5-4Gb RAM masked by PCI is remapped at the top of memory.
> 
> Know which ones, if any, currently can? AMD, Nvidia, or VIA?
> Why would they release a chip that couldn't?

In my (limited) experience, I've only "lost" significant chunks of memory 
on Tyan boards.  Here are the results of 'free' on two systems with 4GB of 
RAM installed:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       3688032    3258792     429240          0     105380    2519000
-/+ buffers/cache:     634412    3053620

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       4012172    3476620     535552          0      67296    2975540
-/+ buffers/cache:     433784    3578388

The first system is dual Athlon MPs on a Tyan S2466.  The second is
dual Xeons on a Supermicro P4DPE.  For good measure, here's free from a 
dual Opteron system with 8GB installed:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       8070688     444488    7626200          0      99488     148820
-/+ buffers/cache:     196180    7874508

That's the Arima/Rioworks HDAMA motherboard.  Given my past experiences 
with Tyan and AMD chipsets (read: S2460 *shudder*), I specifically 
requested that my vendor *not* use the Tyan MB in my Opteron systems.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University