Video Memory

[Ray Parrish]

Lucio M Nicolosi wrote:
>> 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
>   
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

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