Comment 8 for bug 74179

I have a Dell XPS with 4GB memory installed, running 32-bit Ubuntu Hardy 8.04:

jeremy@dell:~$ uname -a
Linux dell 2.6.24-19-generic #1 SMP Wed Jun 18 14:43:41 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux

jeremy@dell:~$ free -m
             total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3033 2937 95 0 82 1866
-/+ buffers/cache: 988 2044
Swap: 3773 203 3569

jeremy@dell:~$ cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 3106188 kB
MemFree: 76584 kB
Buffers: 85548 kB
Cached: 1915864 kB
SwapCached: 64228 kB
Active: 2570856 kB
Inactive: 203964 kB
HighTotal: 2226508 kB
HighFree: 53508 kB
LowTotal: 879680 kB
LowFree: 23076 kB
SwapTotal: 3863592 kB
SwapFree: 3655244 kB
Dirty: 34604 kB
Writeback: 20 kB
AnonPages: 772640 kB
Mapped: 1666920 kB
Slab: 165552 kB
SReclaimable: 137544 kB
SUnreclaim: 28008 kB
PageTables: 6260 kB
NFS_Unstable: 0 kB
Bounce: 0 kB
CommitLimit: 5416684 kB
Committed_AS: 1864320 kB
VmallocTotal: 114680 kB
VmallocUsed: 58192 kB
VmallocChunk: 52472 kB

If I install the linux-server kernel package, I can see all 4GB of memory, but I had issues running vmware player with linux-server kernel, so I had to switch back to the standard desktop kernel which only sees 3GB of memory.

Since the system is 32 bit either way, the difference has to be from an option such as HIGHMEM or some other memory setting in the default Ubuntu kernel not being switched on. With more and more desktops/workstations including 4+ GB of memory today, this option really should be on by default on the 32 bit installs.