Video Memory

[Ray Parrish]

Lucio M Nicolosi wrote:
>> Well, I'm pretty sure it has at least 128 MB's of RAM. I just ran lspci
>> and it reports the following. I've added a couple of blank lines to make
>> it easier to find the lines with the RAM listings.
>>
>> 00:05.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: nVidia Corporation C51G
>> [GeForce 6100] [10de:0242] (rev a2) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
>>    Subsystem: FIRST INTERNATIONAL Computer Inc Unknown device [1509:6006]
>>    Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr-
>> Stepping- SERR- FastB2B-
>>    Status: Cap+ 66MHz+ UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort-
>> <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR-
>>    Latency: 0
>>    Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 20
>>
>>    Region 0: Memory at fb000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
>>    Region 1: Memory at d0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
>>    Region 3: Memory at fc000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
>>    [virtual] Expansion ROM at 30000000 [disabled] [size=128K]
>>
>>    Capabilities: [48] Power Management version 2
>>        Flags: PMEClk- DSI- D1- D2- AuxCurrent=0mA
>> PME(D0-,D1-,D2-,D3hot-,D3cold-)
>>        Status: D0 PME-Enable- DSel=0 DScale=0 PME-
>>    Capabilities: [50] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask- 64bit+
>> Queue=0/0 Enable-
>>        Address: 0000000000000000  Data: 0000
>>
>> Once more the claim is made by a program that it is using 256 MB's of
>> RAM, and this time also an additional 32 MB's along with it, and a 128
>> KB ROM to boot! Oh well, it doesn't seem to be slowing me down any.
>>
>> Later, Ray Parrish
>>     
>
> Please correct me if I'm wrong, seems your video board has indeed a
> resident memory of 256Mb, and requires at least another 128 Mb (RAM
> memory) for managing, thus leaving 384Mb of free RAM. (?)
>
> L.
>   
Well , unless someone snuck into my house, and installed some extra RAM 
in my computer that I haven't noticed yet, the video card using 256 MB's 
of RAM only leaves my main RAM with the other half of the 512 MB's in my 
machine which is 256 MB's as well. Of course I do have a one GB swap 
file in use as well, so maybe I am running with only 256 MB's available 
to the cpu.

No, that can't be right, because if I run the free command, it reports 
384 MB's of total physical RAM available to the system, plus the swap 
file. I just think *something* is fooling all of these other programs 
into reporting 256 MB's for the video card, and it's really only running 
128 MB's.

Here's the output of the free command.

ray at ray-desktop:~$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           375        366          9          0          0         51
-/+ buffers/cache:        314         60
Swap:         1023        501        522

Here's another little oddity. This is what lspci reports for my cpu --

Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron]

And I know that I have an AMD Sempron 3400+ in this machine. Yep, I just 
fired up Sysinfo from the System Tools menu, and it reports this  -- AMD 
Sempron(tm) Processor 3400+ I don't think lspci is working very well.

Later, Ray Parrish

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