4GB with Asus A8N-SLI and A8N-SLI SE

[steev_wilcox 0]

We've just hit a rather tedious issue with the Asus A8N-SLI and A8N-SLI SE motherboards - thought I'd give anyone who'll listen a heads-up

 

We've been trying to get Linux running on a system with 4GB of RAM for a while. You often get only 3.2GB, or 3.4GB. We found almost a year ago that the Asus A8N-SLI will give you 3.9GB, which is pretty much all of it. There are these magic options "hardware remapping over 4GB" and "software remapping over 4GB" in the BIOS. You have to install Linux with these options turned off, reboot and enable them, and then you get almost all your memory. Sorted.

 

Anyway, turns out that Asus have broken the "hardware remapping over 4GB" option in the A8N-SLI SE. You can still use the software option, but if you use the hardware one, you get a kernel panic as soon as a process goes over a certain limit, which seems to be about 400M. We used a variety of kernels (including the latest from kernel.org) and several distros (including Fedora and SuSE).

 

Our computer supplier shipped us one of these SE mobos instead of the A8N-SLI he told us he was shipping, and it's taken days to work out what the problem was. Sheesh.

 

So if you're thinking of using the Asus A8N-SLI SE with 4GB of memory, disable both remapping options, install your chosen distro, and then turn on just software remapping. You'll get pretty much all of your 4GB.

 

Hope this helps someone (would have helped us!), Steev