total memory

[John F. Haugh II]

In article <RON.90Mar17104720 at mlfarm.uucp> ron at mlfarm.uucp (Ronald Florence) writes:
>In article <8111 at tank.uchicago.edu> goer at sophist.uucp (Richard Goerwitz) writes:
> > That "upper" 384 k is used by all PC's and their descendents for
> > various things like the system BIOS, video memory, etc.
>
>The upper 384K is used by "some" PCs.  This is the startup memory of
>Xenix 2.3.2 on our ps2/80 with 6 mb of ram installed:
>
>   mem: total = 6144k, reserved = 4k, kernel = 1340k, user = 4800k

I used to have 2048K of memory, and POST reported there was exactly
2048K of memory, and XENIX agreed.

Then I added another 2048K, and POST reported only 3712K, which is
384K shy of what one might expect.

The answer, in the case of a Wyse 3216 is that the hardware can
remap the 384K if you have only 2MB, but when you have more than
one board it has to leave the ending address of the memory alone
so the next card will start at a reasonable address.

Apparently IBM did the right thing with the PS/2 and Wyse didn't.
-- 
John F. Haugh II                             UUCP: ...!cs.utexas.edu!rpp386!jfh
Ma Bell: (512) 832-8832                           Domain: jfh at rpp386.cactus.org