Wine Hides On-board RAM

[Andreas Mohr]

On Sun, Aug 18, 2002 at 11:32:54AM -0400, Ian D. Stewart wrote:
> I have recently noticed an unusual side-effect of running Wine.  When I 
> first start up my system, /proc/meminfo reports MemTotal as 256892 kb.  
> After running Wine for awhile, /proc/meminfo reports MemTotal as 32680 
> kb.  The system performs as if it only had 32 MB of RAM.  A reboot of 
> the system resets total memory to the proper value.
> 
> My question is:
> 
> 1) Has anybody else encountered this?
> 2) Does anyone know what causes this, or better yet how to avoid it?
> 3) Is there anyway to recover the lost RAM short of a reboot?

Huh ? This is very, very, VERY strange !
Something like this should never happen.
Are you sure it's caused by Wine only, or maybe it is due to faulty memory
instead ? (and thus the board/Linux notices that only 32MB are useable
and resorts to accessing 32MB only).

Again, I'm utterly puzzled when hearing such a story.
Or maybe Wine accesses some Linux memory management function in some way
that causes Linux to tamper with the value for some reason ?
This wouldn't be the first time that Wine is the only program to reveal
some severe bug in Linux memory management...

Definitely try upgrading your kernel, too.

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