Pfsense does not recognize 4GB ram

fosiul

Hi
Today I bought dell server with 4GB of ram
but its looks like to me its only seeing 3 GB of ram, but not 4gb

here is the top outout

Mem: 32M Active, 14M Inact, 34M Wired, 84K Cache, 16M Buf, 2917M Free
Swap: 8192M Total, 8192M Free

why its not seeing 4GB of ram ??
From Bios its seeing 4GB of ram.

Thanks for advise .

wallabybob

This is normal and to be expected. Web page specifications of some commodity motherboards say users cannot expect to see more than about 3GB of RAM when running a 32-bit operating system, particularly certain versions of Windows.

There is a technical discussion at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension

fosiul

HI thanks

so does it mean, i cant use 4gb of ram with pfsense ??

my 1GB would be just waste ?

wallabybob

The 64 bit version of pfSense (still under development) will support use of more than 3GB of RAM.

Depending on your memory configuration and chipset, the 1GB may not be wasted. Common chipsets have two or more channels to memory o they can access multiple memory sticks concurrently. If you take out some memory because its is "wasted" you will likely end up with reduced memory bandwidth because some of the time you will be able to access memory over one one channel rather than two.

How much memory do you really think you will need? 512MB is much more than is needed for many applications.

fosiul

Hi thanks again

From last 3 weeks i am using pfsense in production environment with 1Gb of memory .
Since I am using snort for both External and Internal Interfaces, its consuming 85-90% of memory.

And Some times , browsing gets slow . as Squid+SquidGuard running ( and i set 200 mb for squid )

so my minimum guess is i will need 2GB of ram.

but i thought if I will buy 4GB , as i am thinking i will create 2 VLANs and will put my Inhouse hosing project under this pfsense router and it might need more memory.

kpa

Number of channels (dual or single) has nothing to do with the OS's ability to use the memory in 3-4GB region in case of 32-bit operating systems. The memory mapped I/O memory regions that the PCI devices use have to be addressable all the time and just can not be "swapped" away to access the memory hidden beneath them.

jimp

You could try a 2.0 BETA4 snapshot for the amd64 platform. It can use 4GB and more, so long as your BIOS/MB/CPU support running a 64-bit OS.

fosiul

HI thanks

I am using

SmartValue! DELL PowerEdge R210 (SV3R210)

ref :http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?c=uk&cs=ukbsdt1&kc=305&l=en&oc=SV3R210&s=bsd&sbc=poweredge-r210

With 4GB of ram and the cpu is :

Intel Pentium G6950, 2C, 2.80GHz, 4M Cache, Memory runs at 1066MHz Max

I have few more server of same configuration. and I have installed Centos 64Bit on those

so which means i would be able to install pfsense 64 bit , is not it ??

Thanks again for your supports

jimp

It should work then. Just keep in mind that pfSense 2.0 is still BETA, not a release, so there are still some things that may not work.

Here is a link to an .iso you can use to install it. If you have issues with 2.0, post in the 2.0 board:

http://snapshots.pfsense.org/FreeBSD_RELENG_8_1/amd64/pfSense_HEAD/livecd_installer/pfSense-2.0-BETA4-20100811-0244.iso.gz

fosiul

Hi thanks

I just need bellow 4 packages to work

Snort,Squid,Squid Guard,LightSquid,Bandwidthd

is there any known issue with those 4 packages with 64 bit system ??

jimp

Snort may not work - I think the others are OK. Squid and SquidGuard worked the last time I tested them.

2.0 isn't the issue for packages working, almost all of them are fine there, it's the 64-bit platform that may not have all the packages in order.

fosiul

I am loving pfsense mostly for the snort . it has nice way to block offender by using snort .

but you saying, snort might not work with 64bit, in that case i will have to stick with 32 bit, as i really want to use snort .

but if you say : snort might work, might not then i will 64 bit a try ..

jimp

I haven't tried snort on x64, so I can't say for sure. It might be worth trying. It may not work right now, but it will be fixed eventually.

fosiul

Ok thanks
I will give it a try

and will come back to you on 2.0 Board

fosiul

One more thing , i need advise ..

is this 64 bit recommended to put in production environment ??

if i put this 64bit in production, will there would be any security problem as this is not tested properly

wallabybob

@fosiul:

I have few more server of same configuration. and I have installed Centos 64Bit on those

so which means i would be able to install pfsense 64 bit , is not it ??

Yes, those system should support the 64 bit version of pfSense.

@kpa:

Number of channels (dual or single) has nothing to do with the OS's ability to use the memory in 3-4GB region in case of 32-bit operating systems.

Agreed, my remark about number of memory channels wasn't meant to have anything to do with memory in any particular region it was rather about the consequences of think of some of the memory as "wasted".

Consider a system with dual memory channels, four memory slots each with 1GB of RAM. You boot and see there is 1GB "wasted" memory and remove a stick. Now you have a configuration that at best has a lower available memory bandwidth than it did with 4 memory sticks. Even though that memory is not able to be accessed it is not "wasted" because its presence gives higher memory bandwidth than could be seen in its absence. The higher memory bandwidth might be important if the CPU has multiple threads all working pretty hard.

The guide for the relatively recent motherboard (ASUS M3A78-EMH HDMI) effectively says a user may have one, two or four memory sticks in the system. The guide for a newer motherboard (ASUS M4A785D-M PRO) doesn't suggest that three memory sticks is a bad choice but mentions that some memory may operate in single channel mode if the memory configuration is not chosen wisely.

jimp

It's a BETA snapshot - so that is up to you. We don't generally recommend them for production yet, but some people use them without problems.

There should not be any security issues. There might be a couple missing features or things that don't work quite as expected yet, but those are getting better every day.

It's up to what is required for your system. If you must have more than 4GB of RAM, then you will need to use x64. If you can get by with less for now, stick with 1.2.3 and update after 2.0 is released for real.