Wine Hides On-board RAM

[Mathew McBride]

Happens to Me too,
it appears Micro$oft has been shoving down function calls since 1995 to 
make sure you have the right ram. I have 320Mb, set to imitate winme, 
but my M$ apps say I still don't have enough
Andreas Mohr wrote:

>On Sun, Aug 25, 2002 at 08:17:09AM -0400, Ian D. Stewart wrote:
>  
>
>>On 2002.08.18 12:21 Andreas Mohr wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>On Sun, Aug 18, 2002 at 11:32:54AM -0400, Ian D. Stewart wrote:
>>>      
>>>
>>>>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).
>>>      
>>>
>>Well I can't say with absolute certainty that it's caused by Wine, but 
>>the system runs without any problems for extended periods of time so 
>>long as I don't run Wine, and consistently 'loses' memory when I *do* 
>>run wine.
>>
>>I don't know exactly what's going on.  I do know that there appears to 
>>be some sort of threshold that is reached at which point the memory 
>>hiding occurs (e.g., the same issue arises whether I run Wine for 5 
>>hours at one shot or for 30 minutes a day for 10 days) and the 
>>threshold isn't 'reset' until I reboot.
>>
>>    
>>
>>>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.
>>>      
>>>
>>I have no problem with upgrading, but I would like to know *why* I am 
>>upgrading (i.e., what bug is causing the problem, and how does the new 
>>kernel address the bug).  To do otherwise strikes me as being 
>>equivelant to the tendency in the Windows community whenever something 
>>odd happens.
>>    
>>
>*sigh*
>You're definitely not of the easy kind of people, are you ? ;-)
>A lot of people would just upgrade and be happy in case the bug is fixed,
>but you... :) 
>
>Well, if you're so eager to learn what the problem is, then I'd suggest
>to get your hands pitch black dirty immediately ;-)
>
>Find out where /proc/meminfo gets fed with values, then find out which
>part messes with the MemTotal value in any way.
>
>Hmm, arch/i386/mm/init.c/si_meminfo() sounds like a sure winner.
>I'd suggest looking for the totalram_pages variable (add logging whenever
>that one gets modified in some way).
>OTOH I don't see any place where there is a direct assignment of that
>variable. Hmm, where does that variable even get initialized then ???
>(well, probably declaration auto initialization then)
>
>Oh well, good luck ! ;)
>
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