[Solved] RAM Missing.... 621.6mb RAM ???

My UDOO seemed slower than i expected, was chugging doing simple tasks... So i looked at the performance monitor..... apparently i'm missing ram.

Look at the attached image, you can see ubuntu reporting only 621.6mb of RAM; which with just chromium open is 60% consumed....

What is everyone elses saying? Am i missing something? Wasn't it meant to have a gig? Or is some shared to some graphics or something?

 

Re: RAM Missing.... 621.6mb RAM ???

Hi There,
Can you run a few commands on the terminal to check memory:

• cat /proc/meminfo
  dmesg | grep Memory

Also run 'top' and have a look to see if there is anything unexpected taking a lot of CPU.

BR,
Donal

 

Re: RAM Missing.... 621.6mb RAM ???

Hi,
are you sure your system is slow because of free RAM shortage ?
Keep in mind that Linux OS caches a lot of data in memory to reuse it in case of opening a program already used, moreover you can force Linux to free cached ram with this simple command:
echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
Here more info about Linux RAM usage:
http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2010/ ... y-on-linux

Do you think your system is slower than expected on every operation, or just when you execute specific applications ?

You can change dedicated ram for OS setting mem= parameters in linux bot arguments, see the output of command:
cat /proc/cmdline
Rif http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/bootparam.7.html

Bye
Giuseppe

 

Re: RAM Missing.... 621.6mb RAM ???

I think what he's saying is that sys monitor is only showing 621.6meg of TOTAL memory.
free -m shows the same thing on my dual.

 

Re: RAM Missing.... 621.6mb RAM ???

I'm seeing the same thing.

top reports total memory of 636,544k. Certainly not the expected 1GB.

Any feedback on this? I'm running the Linaro distro that came with the device, and I have also successfully run the downloaded update for kickstarter backers.

 

Re: RAM Missing.... 621.6mb RAM ???

I'll check what my Quad says also later tonight. I suspect, as OP said, that some is being shared to for graphics but I'm curious to know for sure

 

Re: RAM Missing.... 621.6mb RAM ???

1024-621 = 403. There is NO reason 403 MB should be getting used up just for the GPU.

 

Re: RAM Missing.... 621.6mb RAM ???

Agreed. I'm not sure why so much seems to be missing here

 

Re: RAM Missing.... 621.6mb RAM ???

Just to add to the confusion the UDOO Quad schematics show four (4) mt41j256mre-15e sdrams. These are 4 Gb chips (256 megabits X 16. This adds up to a total of 2 G bytes.

 

Re: RAM Missing.... 621.6mb RAM ???

the ram may be setup as 32 bits wide.. so it takes 2.
so it might only be 1 gig at 32 bits wide

 

Re: RAM Missing.... 621.6mb RAM ???

Now that others have confirmed the same low total RAM. A udoo developer needs to comment on this.

I was referring to the total system ram being less than a gb and i only noticed since responsiveness was chugging which prompted me to look at the performance monitor to see the problem.

One note was i was after all this i was compiling opencv and it stalled since my ram maxed out. I closed chromuim and then that gave it the extra ram it needed to unclog itself and hand back some ram. I've now also added a sweap space.. is a swap space bad on an sd card OS?

 

Re: RAM Missing.... 621.6mb RAM ???

From what I can seen from the UDOO schematics the sdram is 256 meg X 64 bits wide therefore a total of 2 G bytes. If this is not correct how am I seeing this wrong?

 

Re: RAM Missing.... 621.6mb RAM ???

Definitely interested in this topic. In general, you don't want to use an SD car for swap because of the random IO characteristics of the card, and the higher than normal IO into swap space can burn out the flash. Also, a lot of SD cards don't have a good TRIM command, so things get weird. I would hook a small SATA drive up to the port and move the swap there.
I started the Android image and was very unimpressed with the build of Android, browser kept crashing and not much worked. I am getting the Linaro version until I can get the time to build a Ubuntu Precise (12.0.4) image to run, although I think it may be a little fun. Honestly, the ability to PXE boot would be awesome, and I may look into this U-Boot for that.
Anyway, I will see if I an confirm what my RAM specs are being reported as.

 

Re: RAM Missing.... 621.6mb RAM ???

So I just did a debug boot via USB/Serial, and I am seeing 1GB of DRAM, but with a bootarg of vmalloc=400M, which if UBoot is anything like what I'm used to vmalloc is the boot argument to dedicate a portion of system RAM to GPU. So with that, by default there is 400M of RAM dedicated to the GPU at boot.

 

Re: RAM Missing.... 621.6mb RAM ???

I'm unsure if swap on an sd card is bad either, but I did the same - I never did check to see that the total ram made sense, though, simply that I was out of ram when updating the system within Ubuntu. I noticed, though, that swapping to an sd card is painfully slow - you'll notice the system come to an absolute halt for a good 20-30 seconds before recovering and continuing

 

Re: RAM Missing.... 621.6mb RAM ???

hrm.. maybe this means they should have increased the ram to 2 gig.. oh well.. I wonder, what about using a thumbdrive for swap.. on the pi the usb drives were actually faster than the built in sd card slot. I wonder if its the same on the udoo?
and what about the quad, is the sata port faster than the sd card? and also do you have a class 10 sd card? my 8 gig card is only class 6 but at least I have a 60 gig laptop hard drive I can use.

maybe we need to get some 32 gig ssd's for our udoos

 

Re: RAM Missing.... 621.6mb RAM ???

I have a class 10 32GB SD Card and it's still very slow to swap to. When copying the image (using diskimager in windows) to the card I was seeing write speeds between 4-11MB/s, normally around 8MB/s (of course, over USB though). I have little doubt the SATA drive will be much quicker - it's something I also plan to add some time soon. Ideally using the SD Card simply to boot to Grub or similar (if possible) and then continuing the boot from an installed OS on the SATA drive

Regarding the USB drive, I would imagine it's faster as well - so that's not a bad idea either. I plan to change the Desktop Environment to something lighter, though - I think this will be a better solution, ultimately trying to use less ram in the first place and hopefully have little need for swap. XFCE is pretty intuitive and lighter than Gnome, which comes on Ubuntu. I see there's a new Desktop Enironment, LXDE, that I'm curious about also and is even lighter

Starting Thursday I'll see if I can get GRUB to load on the SD Card and then use a SATA drive for the OS. I'm not even sure how possible it is but it's something I'd like to see happen and with my past Gentoo experience (and, consequently, compiling kernels and setting up GRUB in various situations) I think it may be. Granted my experience is only with PCs but I don't see how it can't be done on a UDOO

 

Re: RAM Missing.... 621.6mb RAM ???

what I would like is to boot completely off the sata, not even touch the sd card.. dont know if thats possible. suposedly it was one of the things that was mentioned to be possible.

 

Re: RAM Missing.... 621.6mb RAM ???

Agreed, that'd be really nice to be able to do

In the meantime with the SD Card being the primary (only?) boot device putting GRUB on an SD Card and using it to boot elsewhere would work well. Heck a small and slow SD Card should do it fairly well even. And it'd open up the option of multi-booting if it can be done. Separate partitions with multiple OS's, which I wonder then if it'd be possible to dual boot Ubuntu (or other distro) and Android :?:

Oh and, possibly, the opportunity to tell GRUB to boot from USB (I'm thinking USB CD Drive installs maybe?). This would in theory allow installing a wider range of (ARM, of course) OS's

I just don't know how uBoot works or if it can simply be bypassed with GRUB. Guess I'll play around and find out

 

Re: RAM Missing.... 621.6mb RAM ???

Same here with noticing overall slowness of the system.. maybe that's partly to be expected. After checking RAM, I get the same basic results as the original poster.

Code:

$ cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:         636480 kB
MemFree:          272252 kB
Buffers:           17512 kB
Cached:           168384 kB
SwapCached:            0 kB
Active:           145024 kB
Inactive:         100840 kB
Active(anon):      60160 kB
Inactive(anon):      124 kB
Active(file):      84864 kB
Inactive(file):   100716 kB
Unevictable:           0 kB
Mlocked:               0 kB
HighTotal:             0 kB
HighFree:              0 kB
LowTotal:         636480 kB
LowFree:          272252 kB
SwapTotal:             0 kB
SwapFree:              0 kB
Dirty:                 4 kB
Writeback:             4 kB
AnonPages:         60096 kB
Mapped:            33292 kB
Shmem:               316 kB
Slab:              25248 kB
SReclaimable:      14372 kB
SUnreclaim:        10876 kB
KernelStack:        1864 kB
PageTables:         2892 kB
NFS_Unstable:          0 kB
Bounce:                0 kB
WritebackTmp:          0 kB
CommitLimit:      318240 kB
Committed_AS:     677692 kB
VmallocTotal:    1073152 kB
VmallocUsed:        2448 kB
VmallocChunk:    1069652 kB

Code:

$ dmesg | grep Memory
<nothing>

Code:

$ cat /proc/cmdline
console=ttymxc1,115200 root=/dev/mmcblk0p1 rootwait rw fixrtc rootflags=barrier=1 mem=768M arm_freq=996 video=mxcfb0:dev=hdmi,1920x1080M@60,if=RGB24

With the mem flag, I guess I'd expect more reported RAM.. and I suppose 256 is allocated to video memory?