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I have an embedded board with 512MB of RAM running Linux 2.6.29 and UBoot bootloader. But the kernel is able to utilize only 128MB of RAM.

I tried changing the value of XCODE_MEMSIZE, which I think determines how much RAM the kernel uses.

When I set it to 512, the kernel crashes while booting up. Is there any other configuration parameter that needs to be changed?

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Can you be more specific regarding the crash you mention? What do you see on screen? Any errors? – Straphka Sep 26 '11 at 8:47
And what board is it? – Gilles Sep 26 '11 at 23:27
Really need to provide more details about 'only able to use 128MB'. It sounds like something has been limited somewhere (stack size per user, etc). – polynomial Oct 2 '11 at 4:43
how much memory is u-boot detecting? Does it detect the whole of 512MB? – freethinker Dec 8 '11 at 8:22
What does cat /proc/cmdline tell you on your board? – abc May 25 '12 at 2:00

3 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

Without more specific knowledge of your embedded board two things come to mind.

  1. Try kernel mem= boot parameter. (I think sometimes the memory might be available from non-continous address so you might have to use something like this, but the addresses will be have to be checked per you mobo.

    mem=512M@0 mem=256M@0x80000000 mem=256M=0xc0000000

  2. Do you have embedded graphics card? That might take out a chunk of your available ram. If you can get to the bios or equivalent, check that.

@see Kernel paramters for more information on mem=

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You may need to specify a value less than 512M - perhaps there's a device or something at or near physical address 0x20000000 (512M) in the board's memory map, which, you should get a copy of to know where the RAM lives on your board. – ultrasawblade Sep 18 '12 at 19:32
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I guess you should increase RAM Disk size in your kernel.

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up vote -2 down vote

In addition to the other posts about being more specific, I would also suggest unmounting /dev/shm if it is mounted. That is a ramdisk filesystem and eats into your ram.

Also take a look at the sysctl command in linux. Doing something like sysctl -w kernel.shmmax="<some number>" changes the kernel while it's running.

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/dev/shm uses barely any memory if its empty. It will only start using ram once files are loaded into it. – Patrick Jan 6 '12 at 0:35
/dev/shm is nothing but implementation of traditional shared memory concept. It is an efficient means of passing data between programs. One program will create a memory portion, which other processes (if permitted) can access. This will result into speeding up things on Linux. – Satish Jan 3 at 16:05

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