[gentoo-user] Maximizing memory with 32bit

[gentoo-user] Maximizing memory with 32bit

[Alex Schuster]

Hi there!

I have 4GB of RAM, but the system is swapping A LOT. I think I will have 
to go to 64 bit, but I need some time for that, and I need to use the 
system in the meantime.

But: free -m shows only 2787 MB of total memory. I know I cannot use all 
the 4G, but shouldn't there be at least 3GB or even a little more 
available? What is your output of free -m?

wonko@weird ~ $ zgrep HIGHMEM /proc/config.gz 
# CONFIG_NOHIGHMEM is not set
CONFIG_HIGHMEM4G=y
# CONFIG_HIGHMEM64G is not set
CONFIG_HIGHMEM=y
# CONFIG_DEBUG_HIGHMEM is not set

	Wonko

Re: [gentoo-user] Maximizing memory with 32bit

[Johannes Kimmel]

On 06/02/2010 03:27 PM, Alex Schuster wrote:
> Hi there!
>
> I have 4GB of RAM, but the system is swapping A LOT. I think I will have
> to go to 64 bit, but I need some time for that, and I need to use the
> system in the meantime.
>
> But: free -m shows only 2787 MB of total memory. I know I cannot use all
> the 4G, but shouldn't there be at least 3GB or even a little more
> available? What is your output of free -m?
>
> wonko@weird ~ $ zgrep HIGHMEM /proc/config.gz
> # CONFIG_NOHIGHMEM is not set
> CONFIG_HIGHMEM4G=y
> # CONFIG_HIGHMEM64G is not set
> CONFIG_HIGHMEM=y
> # CONFIG_DEBUG_HIGHMEM is not set
>
> 	Wonko
>

Probably your graphicscard uses the rest of the memory.

Johannes Kimmel

Re: [gentoo-user] Maximizing memory with 32bit

[Alex Schuster]

Johannes Kimmel writes:

> On 06/02/2010 03:27 PM, Alex Schuster wrote:

> > But: free -m shows only 2787 MB of total memory. I know I cannot use
> > all the 4G, but shouldn't there be at least 3GB or even a little
> > more available? What is your output of free -m?
[...]

> Probably your graphicscard uses the rest of the memory.

Oh, thanks! Did not think about this. It's an ATI Radeon HD4300 onboard 
card, so I guess this must be the cause. Seems like I will have to do the 
migration to 64bit then.

	Wonko

Re: [gentoo-user] Maximizing memory with 32bit

[J. Roeleveld]

On Wednesday 02 June 2010 16:00:02 Alex Schuster wrote:
> Johannes Kimmel writes:
> > On 06/02/2010 03:27 PM, Alex Schuster wrote:
> > > But: free -m shows only 2787 MB of total memory. I know I cannot use
> > > all the 4G, but shouldn't there be at least 3GB or even a little
> > > more available? What is your output of free -m?
> 
> [...]
> 
> > Probably your graphicscard uses the rest of the memory.
> 
> Oh, thanks! Did not think about this. It's an ATI Radeon HD4300 onboard
> card, so I guess this must be the cause. Seems like I will have to do the
> migration to 64bit then.
> 
> 	Wonko
> 

Wonko,

If your graphics card uses up the rest of the memory, moving up to 64bit won't 
help either.

Check in your BIOS to see if you can reduce the amount your graphics card 
uses. For 'normal' desktop use, around 64MB should be more then sufficient and 
if you have 4GB physically in your system you should then see more memory 
appear.

--
Joost Roeleveld

Re: [gentoo-user] Maximizing memory with 32bit

[Alex Schuster]

J. Roeleveld writes:

> > > Probably your graphicscard uses the rest of the memory.
> > 
> > Oh, thanks! Did not think about this. It's an ATI Radeon HD4300
> > onboard card, so I guess this must be the cause. Seems like I will
> > have to do the migration to 64bit then.

> Wonko,
> 
> If your graphics card uses up the rest of the memory, moving up to
> 64bit won't help either.

Shouldn't I have 4GB minus the amount of graphics memory then, instead of 
3G minus that?
But I plan to add more memory anyway. With at least 6GB, and better 8GB, 
the graphics memory will not matter that much then. But I have to go to a  
64bit system for this.

> Check in your BIOS to see if you can reduce the amount your graphics
> card uses. For 'normal' desktop use, around 64MB should be more then
> sufficient and if you have 4GB physically in your system you should
> then see more memory appear.

Good idea! Thanks, I will have a look there.

BTW, this is part of my lshw output:
       *-display
            description: VGA compatible controller
            product: Radeon HD 3200 Graphics
            vendor: ATI Technologies Inc
            physical id: 5
            bus info: pci@0000:01:05.0
            version: 00
            width: 32 bits
            clock: 33MHz
            capabilities: pm msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
            configuration: driver=fglrx_pci latency=0
            resources: irq:18 memory:d0000000-dfffffff(prefetchable) 
ioport:ee00(size=256) memory:fdfe0000-fdfeffff memory:fde00000-fdefffff

d0000000-dfffffff is 255M, fde00000-fdefffff is 1M. So I lose 1/4 G for 
graphics memory.

	Wonko

Re: [gentoo-user] Maximizing memory with 32bit

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Wed, 2 Jun 2010 17:48:28 +0200, Alex Schuster wrote:

> > If your graphics card uses up the rest of the memory, moving up to
> > 64bit won't help either.  
> 
> Shouldn't I have 4GB minus the amount of graphics memory then, instead
> of 3G minus that?

Some BIOSes only show a maximum of 3GB with the default settings. ISTR
it's something to do with mapping PCI address space over the last GB. I
had to change a BIOS option to see all 4GB on my system.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

There is absolutely no substitute for a genuine lack of preparation.

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64 bits (was: Re: [gentoo-user] Maximizing memory with 32bit)

[Alex Schuster]

I wrote:

> J. Roeleveld writes:
> > > > Probably your graphicscard uses the rest of the memory.
> > > 
> > > Oh, thanks! Did not think about this. It's an ATI Radeon HD4300
> > > onboard card, so I guess this must be the cause. Seems like I will
> > > have to do the migration to 64bit then.
> > 
> > Wonko,
> > 
> > If your graphics card uses up the rest of the memory, moving up to
> > 64bit won't help either.
> 
> Shouldn't I have 4GB minus the amount of graphics memory then, instead
> of 3G minus that?
> But I plan to add more memory anyway. With at least 6GB, and better
> 8GB, the graphics memory will not matter that much then. But I have to
> go to a 64bit system for this.

So I did, I just installed Gentoo again and now I have the 64bit system. 
Wooooow. The system is SO MUCH more responsive now. It's not only because 
of memory - I just removed 2GB, and the system still was more responsive 
than with 2.7GB and 32bit OS. With 32bit, I was not able to play videos 
with mplayer when updatedb or emerge -p --depclean was running, now this 
is no problem, even without [io]nice being used.
I do not know why this is - I did a setup quite similar to the existing 
system. make.conf is the same except for compiler flags, world file is 
nearly identical, kernel .config (2.6.33-tuxonice-r2) is identical except 
for some 64bit specific stuff, /home did not change.

> > Check in your BIOS to see if you can reduce the amount your graphics
> > card uses. For 'normal' desktop use, around 64MB should be more then
> > sufficient and if you have 4GB physically in your system you should
> > then see more memory appear.
> 
> Good idea! Thanks, I will have a look there.

Found it. I can select 128, 256 or 512 MB, and set it to 128 MB.

I hopped on my bike and went to the local hardware store in order to get 
another 4 GB of memory... but it was too expensive. Over a year ago, I 
paid 56 EUR for 4 GB, now I would have to pay 60 EUR for 2 GB. I'll wait.


Now for the 64bit problems. There are few, it's working better than 
expected, but some things are weird.

- At the first login into KDE4, four of my eight desktops were missing the 
background image. With every login, one came back, now I have them all. 
This issue fixed itself somehow.

- My KDE4 is mostly in English now, not in German. kde-base/kde-l10n is 
installed, LINGUAS is set to "de". Some things are in German, though - 
some parts of the systemsettings application, for example.
Oh, and after just another login - it's fixed. What's going on here? Maybe 
I should not write about other problems, and instead reboot a couple of 
times?

- hibernate-ram does not work. When I resume, the display stays black. The 
numlock key ativates the LED, but I could not switch to a text cnosole. 
After Alt-SysRq-R, caps and scroll lock flash, I guess that means kernel 
panic. Happened for two times, I won't try this anymore soon. I see 
nothing in syslog.

- Fortunately, hibernate (suspend to disk with tuxonice) seems to work. 
Did not try other yet, and the very first attempt stopped with the 'wacky 
driver' message. But the 2nd and 3rd attempt succeeded. This worked 
sometimes with the old system, but most of the times it aborted, I had to 
try about ten times for one success. And sometimes the system crashed, so 
I did not use this.
Next morning update: Resume did not work, I got a 'LUKS killed' message. 
Oh no! I do not want to shut down the system every night again, I got used 
to hibernation. I'll ask on the tuxonice mailing list, hopefully this time 
someone can help me.
BTW, I did change the graphics memory size after this, so this change is 
not the cause.

- There is some font problem. There is only one application (media-
tv/tvbrowser) in which the titles look bad, see the attachement (first 
time I do this on a mailing list, but it's small). That's no 
big problem, and I can activate antialiasing in tvbrowser, but I just 
wonder why this happens, this system should be quite identical. A diff of 
eix -I --only-names | grep font on both systems shows nothing.

- x11-libs/xview (from the science overlay) does not build, it has -amd64 
in KEYWORDS. I know about this already, and that I should not even bother 
to try compiling it anyway. But I need this libraries for stuff I am 
building. Linking 32bit libraries to applictions I build with a 64bit 
compiler cannot not work, right? Is there any easier solution than to 
chroot into a 32bit Linux? Which wouldn't be too bad, I still have my 
32bit Gentoo, and I could just trim it down and keep it running.

There were more problems, but they got solved while composing this mail. 
You wouldn't believe how often this happens to me, I start writing an 
email to this list, gather information that you might need to help, and 
solve the problem myself along this.

	Wonko