So, Debian 4.0 Etch finally released a little while ago. I had been running Debian 3.1 Sarge on my old HP box as a virtual server. 3.1 is a few years old and uses the old 2.4 kernel. 4.0 thankfully uses the 2.6 kernel.
Anyway, I wasn't able to update my old box to the new kernel because I made my /boot partition too small to fit the new kernel. I decided this was a good opportunity to make use of my currently useless hulk of an old computer in my AMD Athlon XP 2400+ system. This one was much more powerful than the old HP PIII and had a lot more hard drive space.
So I proceeded to set it all back up again from scratch. I decided since I have so much more hard drive space to play with, I'll get some more RAM too so I can run a lot more than two virtual machines. So I orderd 2 GB of PC2700. Today, I received it and put it in. I log into the webmin managment interface and I see it's only detecting 896MB of the 2.5 GB I have in there. I'm pretty perturbed by this and keep swapping and and switching around my RAM but no matter what I do it's always saying 896MB.
So I hook up a monitor and keyboard to it and boot it and find out the BIOS is detecting all the RAM fine. So I decide to check the kernel logs and find this:
May 25 14:23:59 vm kernel: Warning only 896MB will be used.
May 25 14:23:59 vm kernel: Use a HIGHMEM enabled kernel.
May 25 14:23:59 vm kernel: 896MB LOWMEM available.
What the hell?! So I'm trying to figure out how to enable this HIGHMEM thing now. I think that I have to edit the kernel source and recompile the kernel myself somehow with this option.
Why would there be such a low limit on a supposedly modern operating system, especially one for which has a reputation of being a good server OS?
