Librem 13 only "sees" part of RAM

Hardware
1

Librem 13 v 3.

I haven’t used it in a while, so I opened it up, removed the SSD with PureOS on it, inserted a “spare” SSD, and installed QubesOS on it.

Things were going swimmingly until I realized the laptop only has 4 GiB of RAM. (Qubes recommends 16. But it actually worked because I use minimal templates. It just didn’t let me have two browser VMs open at the same time.)

I went to a brick and mortar computer place, looking to buy a 16 GiB stick and replace the 4 GiB stick. The machine didn’t boot at all–and we did wait because the tech there knew it sometimes takes a laptop a while to figure out a new RAM stick. (Possibly not long enough!). So we put an 8GiB stick in and the system successfully booted; I went home.

Once home I discovered that even though the memory test off the boot menu sees 8Gib, the OS still sees only 4 GiB. I know from my google-fu ing that people have successfully installed 32 GiB sticks in their Librem-13 v 3s.

Do I have to set something in BIOS? If so, how do I do that? I was unable to find any way to get to the BIOS.

[To answer one frequent question–QubesOS does not run in 32 bit…if it were doing so this would, of course, be the result.]

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I think MBR has a RAM limitation if you’re using that instead of gpt.

3

Hmmm…the only MBR limit I can find with a quick google search is on the disk size (2 TB). Nothing I found even mentions RAM, much less a limit on it.

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I’ve never tried to add ram to qubes after the fact. I’m curious if there’s some extra steps that would need to be performed as my understanding is that qubes runs everything as VM’s and as such you don’t normally see the underlying hardware directly.

@Kyle_Rankin might know off-hand. Personally I’d load up the qubes installer and see if the qubes installer environment see’s all 8 Gig of ram as a starting point.

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That’s a good suggestion.

(If I get really ambitious I might just slap that PureOS SSD in there and see what IT says.)

I do know that dom0 (the “exec” VM) reports 3.8 GiB not 4.0–and it did so both before and after I swapped the RAM. But yeah, it COULD be that dom0 had its RAM limit set by the installer. So maybe I just have to re-install. (That’s painful but worth it IF it will solve the problem.)

6

Sorry got wires crossed. What I said is a 32 bit OS limitation (sure you’ve got 64 bit?), not MBR be gpt, which is the partition size like you say.

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Qubes (at least the recent versions) only runs 64 bit, unless I am seriously misunderstanding something.

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9

I would do a live boot (of any Linux distro that will boot) and free

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10

If you are checking from dom0, this is why, dom0 will only show the amount of RAM it has allocated to itself (for instance I think my dom0 only has 2.4GB), and the rest gets distributed among the VMs. Instead of running a tool like free, run xl info | grep memory

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11

Yeah, I just figured that out about two hours ago…my desktop (64GiB) reported the same thing with free.

xl info reports 8 GiB as it should. (Will check the desktop too just in case.) Now I have to figure out why it wouldn’t boot at all with 16 GB (which would be far better than 8) even after waiting a while.