On August 1 I asked the group to help me understand why when I booted an Alphastation
600 5/266 ( I incorrectly called it a 5/250, that's the 2100 we just bought!) it
sometimes reported 12MB of available memory, and sometimes 235MB (actual physical memory
in the system is 256MB). You can see this reported when the system boots and also
from uerf.
Got some good information from the group, but the answer came from another source within
Digital. Turns out that the two available memory reports are in direct correlation with
whether the system was brought up after a power cycle (or after hitting the reset button)
or in the second case, had been rebooted without a power/reset cycle. In the former case,
the console command sho memory shows tested = 33MB. In the latter, it shows it at the 256MB
actually installed. OSF/1 is keying on this when it boots. Apparently, this has nothing to do
with how much memory osf/1 has available to it when the boot is finished, it's just how much is
available at that point in the boot. I had pretty much figured this much out on my own,
had it confirmed by Digital, and also learned from them that if at the console you type
>>> set os_type OpenVMS
then show memory will report 256MB (or whatever) tested, and the available memory will be the
full amount. I was told that osf/1 will work ok with os_type set to openvms, however
openvms will not work properly with it set to osf1.
Received on Sat Aug 05 1995 - 18:29:10 NZST