Video Memory

[Lucio M Nicolosi]

Ray Parrish wrote:
> 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
>>>
>>>   
>>>     
>>>       
>>   
>>     
> 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
>
>   
Sorry, read too quickly and misunderstood, thought you wanted some more 
RAM available. Could your Nvidia have any resident memory, besides RAM?

Explored my own mem and I guess the numbers you get are bytes, so 
dividing by 1024 you would end up with Kbytes, not Mb.

L.

-- 
Lucio M. Nicolosi, Eng. - São Paulo - Brazil
skype: lmnicolosi1
Lat.:  23°34'4.79"S - Long.: 46°39'59.53"W
Linux Regist. User #481505 - http://counter.li.org/