showing 7.7 vs 8GB of memory?

Message

paulb787 · Post by **paulb787** » Thu Oct 13, 2011 5:43 am

why is gnome system monitor only showing 7.7 vs 8GB of memory?

cat /proc/mtrr

reg00: base=0x000000000 ( 0MB), size= 8192MB, count=1: write-back
reg01: base=0x200000000 ( 8192MB), size= 1024MB, count=1: write-back
reg02: base=0x0bb800000 ( 3000MB), size= 8MB, count=1: uncachable
reg03: base=0x0bc000000 ( 3008MB), size= 64MB, count=1: uncachable
reg04: base=0x0c0000000 ( 3072MB), size= 1024MB, count=1: uncachable
reg05: base=0x23fe00000 ( 9214MB), size= 2MB, count=1: uncachable

Thank U

DaggyStyle · Post by **DaggyStyle** » Thu Oct 13, 2011 7:36 am

because it is better for business to write 8G (in decimal) instead of 7.7G in size.

s_bernstein · Post by **s_bernstein** » Thu Oct 13, 2011 1:24 pm

We are talking about RAM here, and that is, as far as I know, always calculated in base2 units. Only the storage supplies need to fool their customers.
Your RAM is showing as 7.7G instead of 8G because there are some parts of your RAM allocated by other hardware (graphics, network, storage) and is therefore unavailable as RAM. You can argue, that they should display 8G of RAM with 300M reserved / inaccessable / unavailable or whateever, but they don't. If I remember correctly this has historical / technical reason.

Ant P. · Post by **Ant P.** » Fri Oct 14, 2011 1:30 pm

The kernel is using 300MB of non-freeable RAM. It'll say the same in top, free, htop, etc.