PfSense thinks I have less than 65mb RAM??

godefroi

I have pfSense installed on an HP t5742 thin client (Atom n280), and during bootup I get a message that says, "Under 512mb RAM detected, not enabling APC". Later on, I get a message that says that under 65mb was detected, and that the webconfigurator startup is being delayed. This is odd, because there is 4GB of RAM in the machine, of which 3GB is usable.

In dmesg:

real memory  = 4296015872 (4097 MB)
avail memory = 3058925568 (2917 MB)

Using sysctl:

[2.2.4-RELEASE][myuser@gateway.domain.com]/home/myuser: sysctl hw.physmem
hw.physmem: 3116466176

Any idea what the deal is?

Guest

Any idea what the deal is?

Is this 32Bit or 64Bit hardware? And what pfSense version you are using? i386 or 64Bit?

godefroi

The Atom N280 is 32-bit hardware, and I'm running the i386 version of pfSense. Clearly, however, the underlying OS knows that there's more than 512MB of memory, the only question is why pfSense doesn't recognize that.

doktornotor

Will never work, pretty simple. x86 => dead.

cmb

Those checks obtain memory from the OS via hw.realmem. That must be showing less than 512 MB RAM, and apparently considerably less than that since it fails elsewhere too. Likely a BIOS bug of some sort I'd guess.

@doktornotor:

Will never work, pretty simple. x86 => dead.

It's certainly dying but there aren't any known issues like this and no reason this shouldn't work (if the hardware's sane).

godefroi

@doktornotor:

Will never work, pretty simple. x86 => dead.

Uh, will work, does work. Everything works fine. I've seen no ill effects from it thinking it has very little memory.

hw.realmem reports:

hw.realmem: 1048576

The three sysctl lines for memory:

hw.physmem: 3116466176
hw.usermem: 2952175616
hw.realmem: 1048576

I don't seem to be the only one having this type of issue, but there's no obvious fix.

cmb

@godefroi:

hw.realmem reports:
hw.realmem: 1048576

There's the issue, definitely a BIOS bug. The BIOS is reporting 1 MB RAM there.

Sounds like it's probably just an annoyance, but upgrade your BIOS if possible, it was possibly fixed in a newer revision. Though those thin clients tend to not get bug fixes as much as PCs and servers do since they're intended to run limited OS options, and probably less RAM than you have in it.