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Andrei Ciobanu
Asked: 2011-03-15 01:57:12 +0800 CST

How to get the amount of memory my linux 32 machine sees . (Not all the physical memory)

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How to get the amount of RAM memory my linux 32 bit sees ? If I use free / top it reports the whole physical memory which exceeds the 32 bit limitations .

linux memory

2 Answers

  1. free and/or top will show how much memory is available to your system. Even if this is > 4GB on a 32-bit system. PAE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension) will let your 32-bit machine use up to 64GB of physical RAM, each process however will be limited to 4GB or less.

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  2. Best Answer

    its worth noting that 32Bit limits you to 4GB not 2GB for ram, PAE allows you to address (and therefore see) more ram but a single process still cant use more than 4gb of ram

    free/top is probably not lying here, try running

    free -m

    to see the results in MB rather han bytes or Kb and this may look more like what you think you should be seeing

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