Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[gcmartin]

I run a LiveDVD FATDOG on a system with 8GB of RAM (soon to go to 24GB). Just noticed today that it appears the FATDOG filesystem is limited to 2GB.

[jamesbond]

Hmmm that's odd. Please tell me the output of running these commands from terminal:

[kirk]

Are you running a multi-session live DVD or just booted ram only? It looks like the init script tries to use 1/2 of ram for tmpfs in those cases.

[gcmartin]

@JamesBond

[gcmartin]

I noticed that my swap device was NOT in use. I restarted the LiveCd system with the swap partition visable. Things have changed.

[jamesbond]

Typo ... the "mount -a" should "mount -t" ... everything else is the same. But don't bother to run that command again. I don't have a machine with 8GB worth of RAM, but this doesn't look right. Can you tell me the output of

[gcmartin]

Here is my 4GB system.

[gcmartin]

OK, I found the source of the swap report I showed in the prior pst.

I actually had plugged a USB into the system before shutdown last night. I did not unplug it when I restarted the system with a HDD configured with SWAP.

So I had 2 swap devices available to the system (each 4GB) when I rebooted and began data capture. Sorry for the report on double swap size. Found the problem when I didn't see the same doubling on a 32bit Wary laptop.

But, the original finding of using ONLY 1/2 of total memory happens exactly on Wary as it does on FATDOG. If you do NOT have a swap partition, Puppies will NOT make all of your memory available to the filesystem.

This fact will be useful as I begin to change 2011 layouts of the Puppies on my LAN that I use and test with.

FATDOG is still the only Puppy that I have which is a competitor with Vista/System7. Its the only one where SAMBA 3.5.6 runs with little effort in setup and running. Other Puppies were cripple by 5.2 development soon after Mobeus got it working in 5.1 . We have gotten lots of hits by person interested in FATDOG+SAMBA.

I had suggested at the beginning of the year that I expected to begin work on using FATDOG as a PDC to avoid a $3000+ cost vs M$ (server and client licensing in a 25 users LAN). I am starting that today and hope to have a simple implementation documented for FATDOG before end of the month. (To me, the documentation is always the most important.)

Again, I thank all who did raise an eyelid when I opened this post. I can only guess why memory is dissected, but, understanding what causes the issue is very important to me.

[jamesbond]

gcmartin, I'm a bit confused. In the first post you mention that your system has 8GB of RAM. In the following posts you mention that your system only have 4GB of RAM. Can you confirm which one? RAM = memory only. Don't count the extra memory you get from swap - swap is swap and it isn't RAM.

"cat /proc/meminfo | grep Total" ==> this command shows that the kernel's understanding of system memory. In all your report it shows 4GB (less a little, which is ok). If your machine really have 8GB of RAM (excluding swap), this is really disconcerting because that means the kernel isn't seeing the rest of your RAM.

Now the /pup_rw filesystem - as kirk said, the size of this is approximately half of what you see in the firstline, first column output of the "free" command. If your machine has only as 4GB RAM, I am now amazed that this /pup_rw is 4GB - it should only 2 GB, regardless how how many swap you have.

[gcmartin]

The diagnostics we did on this and the commands which I used to gather information was done using the 4GB system. The 8GB system was being tested to understand how FATDOG saw its SCSIs when I discovered the memory issue. That system, a Microsoft server, has been put back into production. And was only used briefly.

Again, all of the data gather and shown here is from the 4GB system.