I did a custom installation of 3.18 onto an old Sony Vaio P VGN-P11Z.
It is a dual core Atom sub-netbook [sic] maxed out with 2GB of RAM. I
replaced Raspberry Pi Desktop. It dual-boots with Win XP.

It is working well but only detects 854MB of RAM. I have 2048MB of
RAM, as seen by XP and RPD, and the `dmidecode` tool sees 2GB.

I have tried passing `mem=2G` to the kernel; no change. I am using
`mitigations=off zswap.enabled=1` but removing them makes no
difference.

Today I updated and went from kernel 6.1-29 to 6.1-30. No change.

I am baffled. Anyone have any clues?

-- 
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On Tue, 2023-05-30 at 17:23 +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
> It is working well but only detects 854MB of RAM. [snip] the
> `dmidecode` tool sees 2GB.

Hi Liam,

what is "it"? You are running dmidecode by an Alpine session?
I checked my x86_64 Alpine by an Alpine session running hwinfo. It
correctly showed 32GB, but I did not check, if the free command or
something else shows around 32 GB, too.

Regards,
Ralf

On Thu, 1 Jun 2023 at 16:22, Ralf Mardorf <ralf-mardorf@riseup.net> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 2023-05-30 at 17:23 +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
> > It is working well but only detects 854MB of RAM. [snip] the
> > `dmidecode` tool sees 2GB.
>
> Hi Liam,
>
> what is "it"? You are running dmidecode by an Alpine session?

Correct. The `dmidecode` tool sees the correct amount of memory.

The `free`, `top`, `htop` commands and Xfce task manager all think the
machine has 854MB RAM.

So it is as if some RAM has been stolen by a RAMdisk or something.

> I checked my x86_64 Alpine by an Alpine session running hwinfo.

I'll install that and try.

-- 
Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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Hi Liam,

I'll take a look at free, htop and Co, dmidecode, lshw, hwinfo,
/proc/meminfo and/or similar when I boot Alpine again. My Alpine is a
"System Disk Mode" install.

Are you using a "Diskless Mode" or "Data Disk Mode" install?
https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Installation#Installation_Overview

With only 2 GiB of RAM a shared memory framebuffer might reduce the RAM
noticeable. I've seen missing RAM by hwinfo, with 4, 8 or 16 GiB RAM,
IIRC sometimes double the size of the framebuffer shown by the BIOS was
subtracted, but on my 32 GiB RAM machine hwinfo shows the whole RAM,
without subtracting the framebuffer.

Did you already run

  df -h

Maybe a strange tmpfs thing is shown?

Regards,
Ralf

On Thu, 2023-06-01 at 20:22 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> Did you already run
> 
>   df -h
> 
> Maybe a strange tmpfs thing is shown?

Oops, no, tmpfs doesn't reduce the total size shown by free, but maybe
something else is shown by df.

On Thu, 1 Jun 2023 at 19:23, Ralf Mardorf <ralf-mardorf@riseup.net> wrote:
>
> Hi Liam,
>
> I'll take a look at free

Shows 854 MB.

> htop and Co,

Also shows 854 MB.

> dmidecode, lshw

Show 2 gigabytes.

> hwinfo

I don't think I have that… I will have to add it and see.

> /proc/meminfo

Shows 854 MB.

> and/or similar when I boot Alpine again. My Alpine is a
> "System Disk Mode" install.

Same here. It took me three or four goes, but I achieved a system disc
installation with custom partitioning, by the means of creating and
formatting the petition separately, creating the mount points under
`/mnt`, mounting them where I wanted them to be, and then doing an
installation with them all set up and ready. As a result I have
separate /boot, / and /home partitions as well as a swap partition...
And my Windows XP petition is still there as well, and Alpine dual
boots with XP.
>
> With only 2 GiB of RAM a shared memory framebuffer might reduce the RAM
> noticeable.

XP sees all 2 GB. Raspberry pi desktop saw 2 GB.

> I've seen missing RAM by hwinfo, with 4, 8 or 16 GiB RAM,
> IIRC sometimes double the size of the framebuffer shown by the BIOS was
> subtracted, but on my 32 GiB RAM machine hwinfo shows the whole RAM,
> without subtracting the framebuffer.

The GPU is an Intel Poulsbo. It's a horrible device, and it's not well
supported by modern Linux kernels or x.org, but it doesn't take very
much memory.

> Did you already run
>
>   df -h
>
> Maybe a strange tmpfs thing is shown?

I didn't. I will check this as well.


-- 
Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lproven@gmail.com
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On Tue, 30 May 2023 at 17:23, Liam Proven <lproven@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Today I updated and went from kernel 6.1-29 to 6.1-30. No change.
>
> I am baffled. Anyone have any clues?

By way of a follow-on and thread-bump, yesterday, I updated this
machine to the latest release. No change, and it still only sees
~875MB of my 2GB of RAM.

-- 
Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lproven@gmail.com
Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven
IoM: (+44) 7624 277612: UK: (+44) 7939-087884
Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053