Intel DH77EB suffers from 512 MB limit, is there a solution?

[Greg Pringle]

I have an Intel DH77EB motherboard which has eCs 2.1 installed. To get it to work I had to install the updated ACPI. The system runs but only reports 512 MB  of memory. It has much more. I had heard this could be a Boot Loader issue. Can anyone shed more light on the status of this?

[Doug Bissett]

I have an Intel DH77EB motherboard which has eCs 2.1 installed. To get it to work I had to install the updated ACPI. The system runs but only reports 512 MB  of memory. It has much more. I had heard this could be a Boot Loader issue. Can anyone shed more light on the status of this?

I have a Lenovo ThinkPad L530 that has the same problem (4 GB installed). It is caused because there is a memory hole at the 512 meg mark, that eCS doesn't know how to work around. I have tried both the OS4, and QSINIT, packages, but they don't help. QSINIT may give you some interesting information, but it won't fix the problem, unless you can determine what is causing the memory hole, and remove the cause.

I have heard that somebody is looking into the problem, for Mensys, but I suspect that it is on hold, until eCS 2.2 is finally released. FWIW, eCS works pretty well in 512 meg. Just give it a swap file initial size of about 50 meg (adjust as necessary), and hope they can fix it.

The other option, is to run eCS in a virtual machine, under an OS that can work around a memory hole. I use VirtualBox under Win7 PRO 64 bit, and it works pretty well, although I have not really stressed it much. If you do that, I suggest NOT using the VirtualBox multi CPU feature. ECS doesn't seem to like it. You also need to enable the virtual machine support in the BIOS to be able to run eCS in VirtualBox.

[Joop]

Not sure, may be its helps. Found that the mb has lots of options.

Found this at the net, may be...

"I searched my BIOS using the search tool and browsed through all the sub menus but could not find a setting named "IGD Minimum memory" but I found what I was looking for by switching my BIOS to classic mode. There was the exact option I was searching and it was named just like what I expected. It is called "IGD DVMT memory" under the configuration>video>IGD DVMT memory. Though the issue got solved for now as I changed the setting from "maximum DVMT" to "512 MB". But I wonder why it behaves strange when I put the setting as "Maximum DVMT" it shows only 64MB as dedicated minimum memory in the OS and when I change it to 512MB it shows 512MB dedicated memory. I found ASUS and others having an additional choice offering upto 1024MB to use as dedicated minimum memory."

Cheers,
Joop

[Greg Pringle]

Thanks for the info Doug. I will be waiting for a Mesys fix.
I tried the solution from Joop and found it hung the machine during boot with the DVMT setting of 512 (video memory allocated). When I changed the setting to 128 the machine booted fine. This change did not fix the memory reported by eCs. At present I am using the machine with the 512 real memory limit. I would like to have more because there are more applications I would like to run.

[Doug Bissett]

I will be waiting for a Mesys fix.

You, me, and a lot of other people are waiting for a lot of things. Most people don't even know that they are waiting for the fix, but it looks like any new hardware (especially laptops) will require it.

I would like to have more because there are more applications I would like to run.

Actually, physical memory has very little to do with how much memory applications can use. The swapping system works very well, and with modern hardware, it becomes less noticeable because of the speed. The trick is to allocate a large enough initial swap size that it doesn't end up thrashing. That is why I suggest a 50 meg initial size, which can be increased, if necessary. There are a few things that need real memory (like VirtualBox), but if you start those first, the swapping system will look after the rest.

Found that the mb has lots of options.

Unfortunately, my L530 has very few options, and I have tried everything that would seem to be safe to try. It seems that eCS needs to be trained to skip over stray memory holes, that seem to pop up anywhere in memory. IMO, UEFI is poorly designed, and even more poorly documented, but I suppose that is to be expected, considering where it came from.

[Neil Waldhauer]

I'm seeing this problem also on a Lenovo ThinkCentre M72e. I'm hoping for a solution from Mensys in time.