shown memory size

Hello,

Last week I bought a new laptop with 16GiB memory installed. When I dive in the BIOS at boot it tells me I have 16GiB so it’s all there and all is working.
But in Tumbleweed I see other numbers. In Conky for example I only see 13.6GiB. Even when multiplied with 1.024^3 I only get 14.6.
When I type free in a terminal I get:

$ free
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:          13926        2479        2054         559        9392       10559
Swap:         16383           4       16379

Do I make the wrong calculations or is a part of the memory not there, or is it used by something else? What is going on here?

If your laptop has CPU graphics then some of your main memory might be assigned to that exclusively.

Regards

susejunky

Of course, that must be it. I have an AMD 5 3500 CPU with Vega 8 graphics. Never thought of the video memory. Thanks for your help.

Hi
You can see what it used/allocated via;


glxinfo | egrep -i 'device|memory'

On my laptop with dual graphics (System RAM is 12GB);


free  -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           11Gi       845Mi       9.6Gi       2.0Mi       736Mi        10Gi

glxinfo | egrep -i 'device|memory'

    Device: AMD CARRIZO (DRM 3.38.0, 5.8.10-1-default, LLVM 10.0.1) (0x9874)
    Video memory: 512MB
    Unified memory: no
....
Memory info (GL_NVX_gpu_memory_info):
    Dedicated video memory: 512 MB
    Total available memory: 3584 MB
    Currently available dedicated video memory: 410 MB
....

DRI_PRIME=1 glxinfo | egrep -i 'device|memory'

    Device: AMD Radeon (TM) R7 M340 (ICELAND, DRM 3.38.0, 5.8.10-1-default, LLVM 10.0.1) (0x6900)
    Video memory: 2048MB
    Unified memory: no
....
Memory info (GL_NVX_gpu_memory_info):
    Dedicated video memory: 2048 MB
    Total available memory: 5120 MB
....

So depending on the card, as can be seen above it will use more if required… even though it has allocated 1GB of RAM…