Video Memory

[Ray Parrish]

Lucio M Nicolosi wrote:
> Ray Parrish wrote:
>   
>> Hello,
>>
>> I have an Nvidia GeForce 6100 video card onboard my motherboard that 
>> uses shared memory. In the bios of my machine it is allocated 128 MBs of 
>> RAM from my meager 512 MB system RAM.
>>
>> For some reason, every program I have used to inspect the video 
>> parameters report that my video card is using 256 MBs of RAM. This 
>> includes "nvidia-settings -a" which reports " Attribute 'VideoRam' 
>> (ray-desktop:0.0): 262144." which when divided by 1024 yields exactly 
>> 256 MBs. Also the sysinfo gui program at Applications, System Tools, 
>> Sysinfo reports 256 MB.
>>
>> free reports 384436 bytes total RAM, which when divided by 1024 gives 
>> 375.42578125 MBs.
>>
>> Are there any other commands which can return the amount of video memory 
>> in use? I've spent quite a bit of time looking through the man files 
>> searching for one, and haven't found anything yet.
>>
>> Is it possible for Ubuntu to over ride the bios setting and allocate 
>> more RAM to the video card?
>>
>> I'm not experiencing any problems, but I am curious why everything keeps 
>> telling me the video card is using 256 MBs of RAM.
>>
>> Thanks, Later, Ray Parrish
>>
>>   
>>     
> Is it possible to edit your BIOS configuration and restrict the amount 
> of memory reserved for video?
>
> L.
>   
Hello,

The video card is already set to use only 128 MB in the BIOS. That's why 
I was asking if it was possible for the operating system to over ride 
the BIOS, and give the video card more RAM.

I would also like to know if anyone knows a command that I can use to 
double check the amount of RAM in use by the video card. All I can find 
to check it with is the nvidia-settings command that comes with the 
board's driver, and the Sysinfo program, neither of which I trust much.

OK. I've figured it out.

I used cat and ls to explore the /proc/ file system until I found the 
following information.

ray at ray-desktop:~$ cat /proc/iomem
00000000-0009efff : System RAM
0009f000-0009ffff : reserved
000a0000-000bffff : Video RAM area

I then fired up my calculator, and converted those hex numbers to 
decimal, and subtracted the small one from the big one, then divided the 
result by 1024 to convert to MB's, and I get 127.999023438 which when 
rounded off is 128 MB's of RAM, just like the BIOS has it set to. I 
thought those two programs were wrong!

Later, Ray Parrish

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