[Gllug] find how much RAM is available.

[Russell Howe]

On Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 09:32:13PM +0100, Pooly wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm a bit confused, I've unscrew my laptop to check if I can add some
> RAM, and on the one I have, it's written, 256Mo,DDR,333,CL2.5. But
> dmesg gives me :
> Memory: 186036k/195520k available (1632k kernel code, 8856k reserved, 696k data,
>  180k init, 0k highmem)
> So, 256 gainst 196Mo... Which one should I believe ?
> Should I go in the bios, tweaking it ? or add a param to Grub when I boot ?
> Last, where is the best place to buy RAM in London ?

I quite like Crucial for RAM. They're not the cheapest supplier, but
it's free special delivery and a lifetime guarantee on the chips with
guaranteed compatibility.

http://www.crucial.com/uk

Their memory selector will also give you an (IME accurate) indication of
how many RAM slots your machine should have and the type and capacity of
compatible modules.

And yeah, it sounds like your graphics chip has reserved 64MiB of RAM
for its use, although if you don't use 3D you are unlikely to need more
than about 4 of this. The large amounts of RAM found on modern graphics
cards is mostly used for textures when doing 3D (and probably geometry
and various other 3D-ish things). When just doing 2D you probably want
just enough RAM for the framebuffer, multiplied by perhaps 2 or 3 for
double/triple bufferring and then a bit more for offscreen compositing
etc.

On older boards, the amount of system RAM stolen by the graphics card
was configurable, not sure about more modern machines (and laptop BIOSes
can be quite a lot more limited than those found on desktop
motherboards)

-- 
Russell Howe       | Why be just another cog in the machine,
rhowe at siksai.co.uk | when you can be the spanner in the works?
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