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I am making the transition from Windows to Ubuntu. My desktop has 32GB of physical memory installed and all detected by BIOS and previous versions of OS. Since I have moved to Ubuntu 16.04, it only recognizes 3.6GB. All OS tools report the same memory, free -h, top, dmesg etc.

I am running x86_64. Is there a config setting to access the full memory?

free -h:

free -h

top:

top

Please let me know if you need any log output or information. Thanks in advance.

Update

Output of dmesg | grep Memory 

Root@AGsys:~# dmesg |grep Memory 
[ 0.000000] Memory: 3420004K/3667512K available (8394K kernel code, 1282K rwdata, 3944K rodata, 1480K init, 1292K bss, 247508K reserved, 0K cma-reserved)

Output of uname -a

root@AGsys:~# uname -a 
Linux AGsys 4.4.0-36-generic #55-Ubuntu SMP Thu Aug 11 18:01:55 UTC 2016 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
edwinksl
  • 24,109
TechE Monk
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2 Answers2

4

There are two likely causes for this:

  1. If you're running a 32-bit version of Ubuntu, it will only use a maximum of about 3.5 GB of your installed RAM, regardless how many and how big DIMMs you have. Since your system reports as 64-bit, if this is the case it may indicate additional problems; reinstalling clean is the most reliable way to fix this, though it may be due to leftover start command settings in GRUB.

  2. It's not unheard of to receive counterfeit parts. That is to say, it's possible you were sold 2 GB DIMMs as 32 GB DIMMs. Since I see from your last comment that you're running 64-bit Ubuntu, this seems the more likely possibility. If you remove one of the DIMMs and look at the part number stamped on one of the chips, you/we may be able to verify that the chip part is in fact a 32 Gb chip, or alternately that it's a 2 Gb part.

Zeiss Ikon
  • 5,248
0

UPDATE

It appears that the issue was with the 32bit kernel that I had before I upgraded to 64bit 16.04. I installed 16.04 after a clean install and I can see the correct memory now.

Thanks for your support.

Cheers!

TechE Monk
  • 21