Video Memory

[Ray Parrish]

Derek Broughton wrote:
> Ray Parrish wrote:
>
>   
>> Lucio M Nicolosi wrote:
>>     
>>> 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. (?)
>>>
>>>       
>> 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. 
>>     
>
> No, I think Lucio is probably at least close.  Many video cards have their
> _own_ on-board memory.  In fact, I think since you have an actual video
> card, rather than intel-on-the-motherboard, it's likely.  I'm not sure that
> your video has 256MB, I rather think it's 128MB of its own memory, and
> 128MB of your system's memory.  So the system sees it as using 256MB, and
> it's still only using 128MB of main memory.  
>
> I'd want to try telling your BIOS to use _less_ memory, and see what
> happens - seems to me any system still limping along on a mere .5GB of main
> memory doesn't need to be running video modes that need 256M
>   
Hello,

The whole point of this thread has been to discover why things in Ubuntu 
report the figure of 256 MBs allocated to my "on board" not separate 
video card, when I have the BIOS set to 128 MBs for the video card's 
shared memory allocation.

I looked at the motherboard's web site today. It's a First International 
Computers, Inc. K8MC51G that uses an Nvidia chipset. There wasn't much 
information, just a short list of basic capabilities.

I installed hwinfo today, and have just ran it. It offers a framebuffer 
parameter, but when i use it, it returns nothing. I used the -all 
parameter and in the output I found the following for the video card.

  Driver Modules: "nvidia"
  Memory Range: 0xfb000000-0xfbffffff (rw,non-prefetchable)
  Memory Range: 0xd0000000-0xdfffffff (rw,prefetchable)
  Memory Range: 0xfc000000-0xfcffffff (rw,non-prefetchable)
  Memory Range: 0x30000000-0x3001ffff (ro,prefetchable,disabled)

However I don't know for sure what the numbers are. I used my calculator 
to try to convert the numbers to decimal, but when I plug them in as hex 
and try to convert, the second number in the first row returns the error 
"no sane value" from the calculator. The same happens if I try it as 
octal first and try to convert to decimal.

It's been too long since I went to college, so I don't remember what I'm 
doing with numbers of this sort. I was trying to convert the portions 
after the 0x and I'm not sure if that is what I should be doing with them.

Anyway, if someone can tell me what the numbers above mean we can see 
what particular utility is returning. Anybody out there currently in a 
college level math class?

Later, Ray Parrish

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