Via mini-ITX - memory less than 128MB and unsupported hardware errors?
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I'm running pfsense on a Via Epia 5000 500MHz mini-ITX board with 512MB memory and a 20GB laptop hard drive. Although it seems to work fine, pfsense is displaying an error about running less than 128MB memroy not recommended and hardware not supported. Is there a problem with pfsense on this Via board and a reason why it thinks there's unsufficient memory?
Thanks,
peeble-uk
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FreeBSD relies on the BIOS to tell it what memory is available. If the BIOS reports 512MB and FreeBSD reports no more than 128MB then it would seem likely that there is an error in the BIOS provided memory map. This might be corrected by a BIOS update.
I suggest you post the startup output so I have a better idea of what is being reported.
It may be that the BIOS specifies an unnecessarily large amount of memory to be shared with the video controller. For pfSense you can probably quite safely shrink this to the smallest possible value.
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Thanks for your reply. Sorry for my tardy response, but have been away on hols:-)
I'll check out the POST as you suggest. I'm not aware that the Via board reserves memory for video - it only has basic video on board.
Thanks again - peeble-uk
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I'm not aware that the Via board reserves memory for video - it only has basic video on board.
I don't know that your particular board reserves RAM for video use. However, since this seems to be common in systems with integrated graphics its worth investigating. I have two different types of mini-ITX boards (one Jetway and one Gigabyte) with VIA C3 CPUs and VIA chipsets and both grab some RAM for graphics memory.
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It would have to be using the majority of the RAM for the video if it drops the usable RAM from 512 to under 123 MB (the limit for that 128 MB error). Check the system logs after booting to see how much memory is shown.