I have just installed redhat linux 6.2 onto a PC with 256MB of RAM on an MS-6153VA ATX VIA Apollo Pro133 Mainboard. Linux is reporting that there is only 64MB of RAM. The BIOS, win95 and win98 all report 256MB of RAM.
I got linux to recognise the correct amount of memory by sepcifying the "mem=256MB" option to lilo. Is this a BIOS problem or a linux problem? Is it simply that this is a new-ish motherboard, and it will all go away at some point in the future or will I have to explicity set the memory forever more?
This sounds like your bios doesn't support the extended memory detection call that the 2.2.14 kernel we ship uses. This shouldn't be a problem with the 2.4 kernel since it uses the 0e80 call to get the bios memory mapping. Until then you will need to keep passing the mem= parameter to the 2.2 kernels on your machine.
Duh....that should be the e820 call in the sentences above....technical accuracy and all...