Have you tried booting it with FreeBSD 10.3 amd64 yet? If not, please try that with both memory modules installed.įrom everything you have said, I am almost entirely convinced that this is purely a software issue, and your hardware is probably fine. If you were continuing to use the i386 build of FreeBSD, it is no surprise that available memory is low.Īs with most motherboards, having the first memory slot empty is an invalid hardware config.

If you have some other reason to believe there is a problem with the memory, some details might help get better suggestions. If the only reason for believing there is a problem with the RAM is the low reported avail memory, the root cause may well be solely down to running an i386 build. If your real physical memory is 8GB, amd64 is the only real choice to get full use of the system (you could try to do an i386+PAE setup, but I recommend against that without a truly compelling justification for it). That might entirely solve the problem for you, or at least move things in the right direction. Even if you still have a problem with 'lost' memory, it will run fine in the 2GB-ish memory you were reporting. I suggest trying just a default boot of 10.3 amd64, and see where that takes you. I suspect what you are seeing is a mixture of over half your RAM effectively being unavailable, followed by more being lost to video memory eating a large chunk of your address space, or something similar to that. That's at least part of the problem you encountered. The major problem is running i386 builds on systems with more than 4GB RAM, since you only have 4GB of address space on i386. I've got an older 2GB Core 2 Mac that runs 64-bit OS X or FreeBSD just fine, and a small web server running FreeBSD 10.3 amd64 which only has 3GB RAM. There's no specific minimum RAM for the amd64 build, although I'd guess the practical minimum is probably around 1GB (a minimal-ish boot of FreeBSD 10.x amd64 uses around 0.5GB).

Yeah, you can run amd64 builds with less than 4GB.

Command to check memory slot on linux