free ram?

[c9550927]

Hi,

I just got my box from a forum sponsor so I know its genuine but I've shocked to see the amount of report RAM to be incorrect in my box. See here

root@vusolose:~# uname -a
Linux vusolose 3.13.5 #1 SMP Fri Feb 27 14:20:11 GMT 2015 mips GNU/Linux
root@vusolose:~# cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:         572548 kB
MemFree:          462648 kB
Buffers:               0 kB
Cached:            48752 kB
SwapCached:            0 kB
Active:            41024 kB
Inactive:          38276 kB
Active(anon):      30588 kB
Inactive(anon):       64 kB
Active(file):      10436 kB
Inactive(file):    38212 kB
Unevictable:           0 kB
Mlocked:               0 kB
SwapTotal:             0 kB
SwapFree:              0 kB
Dirty:                 0 kB
Writeback:             0 kB
AnonPages:         30548 kB
Mapped:            15464 kB
Shmem:               104 kB
Slab:              13372 kB
SReclaimable:       4356 kB
SUnreclaim:         9016 kB
KernelStack:         688 kB
PageTables:         1076 kB
NFS_Unstable:          0 kB
Bounce:                0 kB
WritebackTmp:          0 kB
CommitLimit:      286272 kB
Committed_AS:     254776 kB
VmallocTotal:     509876 kB
VmallocUsed:       12896 kB
VmallocChunk:     487444 kB
root@vusolose:~# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           559        107        451          0          0         47
-/+ buffers/cache:         59        499
Swap:            0          0          0
root@vusolose:~#

Shouldn't the box have 1GB RAM?

Webif output here

Specs are (http://www.world-of-satellite.co.uk/Digital-Satellite-Receivers/Vu/VU-Plus-Solo-SE-dvb-s-s2)

Vu+ Solo SE Technical Highlights:

1300 MHz Dual Core Mips processor
Plug & Play Tuner (DVB-S2, DVB-C / T, DVB-C/T/T2) 1X DVB-S/S2 INCLUDED
256MB Flash
1 GB DDR3 DRAM
1 x DVB Common Interface slot
1 x Smartcard-Reader (Xcrypt)
2 x USB
10/100 Mbit Ethernet Interface
SPDIF audio output optical (digital)
1 x HDMI 1.4 video / audio output (digital)
1 x RCA video output
2 x Audio output (L / R) RCA (analog)
unlimited channel lists for TV / Radio
EPG (electronic program guide) support
Support of Bouquet lists
OSD in many languages ​​and skin-support
automatic / manual channel search
DiSEqC 1.0/1.1/1.2, USALS
External 12V power supply
power switch

 

[Larry-G]

The receiver does have 1GB of ram but holds back a portion for system use, you would need to generate a boot log via a serial cable to get a real readout of the ram size.

 

[c9550927]

*PHEW*

Thanks for letting me know what's going on. I have to admit I've never seen this kind of behaviour in my many years of using Linux, even dmesg didnt give a clue this was happening, where I'd expect to see some kind of message telling me.

 

[Larry-G]

Yeah it happens with all E2 boxes to some degree, and especially now with the inclusion of the XBMC plugin from Vu+.

 

[c9550927]

Odd no one talks about this issue, or maybe they do and I've never seen it?.

Also makes it more important to get a box with at least 1GB RAM. Can't say I saw this much disappear with my Uno (i know it didn't have 1GB but i mean proportionally speaking).

 

[Larry-G]

The odd post pops up now and again, usually you dont loose that much, I can only assume it is down to the XBMC plugin if you have that installed.

 

[pac2000]

All E2 Boxes Reserve About Half For System Overheads... System/Drivers/Frame Buffer/I/O Buffers All Require Reserved Memory... The Memory Total Is Actually What's Left Over After That...

If You Look At Phones/Tablets Storage And Memory, A Similar Thing Occurs... Same As When You Format A Hard Drive, The File System Takes Up A Chunk Before You Even Start Using It...

 

[c9550927]

All E2 Boxes Reserve About Half For System Overheads... System/Drivers/Frame Buffer/I/O Buffers All Require Reserved Memory... The Memory Total Is Actually What's Left Over After That...

If You Look At Phones/Tablets Storage And Memory, A Similar Thing Occurs... Same As When You Format A Hard Drive, The File System Takes Up A Chunk Before You Even Start Using It...

Hdd are not like that lol... that's the old 1000 vs 10 24 issue. same with android, I'm not talking about file system reserved on the nand for apps etc as with system files. I'm talking about ram. the two are two different things, The total ram should be 1024 MB irrespective of what's running. free ram I'd expect to be less due to running plug in.

You should always have 1024 megabytes total available, and free would be minus anything used. So actually I think something is wrong here!. These boxes do not appear to have 1gb ram as advertised.

I'm talking of RAM, not available space on the flash/NAND.

 

[c9550927]

Apparently the box does partion ram like this. This is not how linux normally works btw. seems I'm not the only one wondering why this is the case (on x86 anyway)

http://www.vuplusupport.org/wbb3/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=41702