intensely fascinating shit

[rone]

We're using a particular Tyan board on many of the workstations at work.  It maxes out at 4 RAM sticks of 1 GB each, for a total of 4 GB.  However, upon booting, the OS (and memtest86) would only find 3296 MB (despite the BIOS claiming "4096 MB OK").  I updated the BIOS and that let us have 128 MB more, for a total of 3424 MB.  A friendly Google search yielded information that suggested we enable the "software memory hole" in the BIOS setup; apparently, these things reserve space between 3.5 GB and 4 GB for god knows what, and enabling the setting frees that up.  Upon enabling the SMH, the RAM test during bootup shows it happily counting up to 3072 MB, freezing for a second, then counting up from 4096 MB to 5120 MB, and upon reaching that, going back to display "4096 MB OK".  The OS now admits to seeing all the RAM.

(Oh, and i didn't even go into the near-impossibility of making a bootable CD that included the BIOS Flash file and utility that worked.  We ended up finding a floppy drive and disk rather than suffer and keep dumping coasters.)

It's a good thing that my livelihood doesn't depend on understanding computers, because god damn i hate the fuckin' things.

Comments

I've been living with this in virtual storage

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

since before I ever had a PC. Way back before VM/XA, the CMS nucleus had to sit below the 16 MB line. Larger virtual machines had a hole in them from 12 to 16 MB. I still occasionally deal with a few old programs that need to use shared segments below the line. Actually, I had thought this was finally gone, but I still seem to have a hole from 9 to 13 MB where our SYSPROF loads four dummy segments that used to be needed to keep the space available for those programs (primarily OfficeVision, now long gone) to use.