I am working on a small x86 kernel. I am accessing and attempting to read the memory map that GRUB provides in the multiboot header. I have an Intel i3 cpu and 4 GiB of RAM. While running on this machine, I am reading the following memory map:
--Base Address-- --Length-- --Type--
0x0000000000000000 0x000000000009d000 0x1
0x000000000009d000 0x0000000000003000 0x2
0x00000000000e0000 0x0000000000020000 0x2
0x0000000000100000 0x00000000bb53f000 0x1
0x00000000bb63f000 0x0000000000080000 0x2
0x00000000bb6bf000 0x0000000000100000 0x4
0x00000000bb7bf000 0x0000000000040000 0x3
0x00000000bb7ff000 0x0000000000001000 0x1
0x00000000bb800000 0x0000000004800000 0x2
0x00000000e0000000 0x0000000010000000 0x2
0x00000000feb00000 0x0000000000004000 0x2
0x00000000fec00000 0x0000000000001000 0x2
0x00000000fed10000 0x0000000000004000 0x2
0x00000000fed18000 0x0000000000002000 0x2
0x00000000fed1b000 0x0000000000005000 0x2
0x00000000fee00000 0x0000000000001000 0x2
0x00000000ffe80000 0x0000000000180000 0x2
0x0000000100000000 0x0000000038000000 0x1
When I total up the available memory areas, I get...
0x1 (Available) - 3893.8 MiB
Which seems about right, leaving the last 200ish MiB reserved for other devices. The only problem is the total of the other memory types:
0x2, 0x3, 0x4 - 331.5 MiB
Putting my total amount of RAM at 4225.3 MiB or a little over 4.1 GiB, which leads me to my questions:
Why am I totaling more than 4GiB of RAM when I only have 4GiB installed?
Why is the last base address in the memory map 0x0000000100000000? With only 4GiB of RAM, 32 bits should be the max address size needed to address all of it. Am I misunderstanding something here?
Some thoughts:
0x0000000100000000
is >= 2^32. This is usually done, because hardware, ROM images and other special ranges are allocated below 2^32 in (all?) PCs. Thus, either PAE or long mode is required to access main memory ranges starting at or above 2^32.Edit:
Look here for more details: http://wiki.osdev.org/Detecting_Memory_%28x86%29
Edit 2:
Today, I stumbled upon a Sysinternals tool, which shows following physical range mapping for my EFI System, without any related setting altered. As one can see, all of 64GiB main memory is mapped at 0x100000000
, right at 2^32:
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