Zounds! The disk I was using was 5.0.2. (red face)

The messages from the boot never said what version was being booted. Of
course the media disk doesn't either. Thanks to your suggestion I finally
used "uname -X" to find my mistake.

Thank you for your timely and comprehensive reply. I'd send you a cookie
but internet cookies aren't really all that tasty.

Frank

"Bela Lubkin" <belal@sco.com> wrote in message
news:20031107224257.GG14056@sco.com...
> Frank Mabrey wrote:
>
> > I am building a server that has 4 gig of RAM using OpenServer 5.0.5.
The
> > large amount of RAM is for I/O buffers for a DBMS.
> >
> > I built a 6 gig swap area, thinking a smaller swap area might be
limiting
> > how much ram the OS can see.
> >
> > I boot with mem=1m-16m,16m-4092m/n/p to force OS to see all the RAM.
The
> > message shows all the RAM is found.
> >
> > Still the boot up messages tell me I have a
> > "mem: total = 787388k" with
> > "kernel = 18384k, user = 769004k"
> >
> > Have I run into some kind of undocumented limit?
>
> Are you sure you're running 5.0.5? The amount it's reporting is how
> much you would see with OpenServer 5.0.0 or 5.0.2, which had a 768MB
> memory limit. Also, 5.0.0 and 5.0.2 would only see 512MB unless you
> forced the issue with a "mem=" bootstring like you show; 5.0.4 and later
> will see the extra memory by default.
>
> The amount of RAM OpenServer sees is not at all limited by swap. The
> amount you can _use_ may be limited slightly if you have very little
> swap (it varies greatly depending on how your applications uses memory,
> but under typical conditions you will need your swap to be at least 1/4
> as big as your RAM to be able to use all of RAM).
>
> No single swap area can be larger than 4GB, though you can have multiple
> 4GB swap areas. Before 5.0.6 behavior with >4GB swap was a bit
> unpredictable, so you should definitely reduce that to 4GB.
>
> > Also, the man for mem says that, by default, RAM above 16m is not DMA.
Is
> > this a restriction or a default? Could it be affecting my problem?
>
> Memory above 16MB cannot be reached by the old ISA DMA controller (which
> is still used by e.g. standard floppy drives). This is a hardware
> limitation; it's also of very little importance in 2003, when most
> devices that use DMA are PCI devices that have access to the full 4GB
> address space.
>
> >Bela<