# Where has the "Video Memory" gone?



## miniqq (Mar 17, 2011)

I installed 8.2 stable on a laptop with Intel video card, which has 256MB video memory. But why does Xorg not allocate that 256MB? It just takes my main physical memory.


```
last pid:  5242;  load averages:  0.27,  0.31,  0.22              up 0+02:54:18  22:29:41
65 processes:  1 running, 64 sleeping
CPU:  0.2% user,  0.0% nice,  0.2% system,  0.2% interrupt, 99.5% idle
Mem: 279M Active, 385M Inact, 200M Wired, 612K Cache, 107M Buf, 95M Free
Swap: 2048M Total, 2048M Free

  PID USERNAME      THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE   C   TIME   WCPU COMMAND
 1994 slr            15  44    0   311M   203M ucond   0  15:09  1.95% firefox-bin
 1757 root            1  44    0   436M   324M select  1   4:36  0.78% Xorg
```

Is it normal? And the X started aiglx. In that case, I had no more memory for other appslication! Oh, back to Nvidia!


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## SirDice (Mar 17, 2011)

What makes you think it's using your main memory?

It's possible though, some integrated graphicscards don't have memory of their own and use the computer's memory. You can usually set the amount assigned to the graphicscard in the BIOS.


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## wblock@ (Mar 17, 2011)

miniqq said:
			
		

> I install 8.2 stable on a laptop with intel video card which has 256MB video memory. But why the Xorg does not locate on that 256MB. It just takes my main phy mem.



It might help to know the make and model of the laptop.  I was under the impression that all Intel video used shared memory, but maybe not.



> Is it normal? And the X had started aiglx. In that case, I had no more memory for other apps!



Your top output shows 385M inactive and 95M free.  That's fine.  FreeBSD doesn't leave free memory laying around when it can keep something useful in it.  When that memory is needed to run a new program, it's easily available.



> Oh, back to Nvidia!



On an Intel latop?  How?


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## miniqq (Mar 18, 2011)

> What makes you think it's using your main memory?



Because the RES more than 256MB, if it's located in VideoMemory, it should not be so high. If use NVidia, it's just 10 to 50 MB, or less.



> It's possible though, some integrated graphicscards don't have memory of their own and use the computer's memory.



But it says it has 256MB memory.



> You can usually set the amount assigned to the graphicscard in the BIOS.



My bios doesn't support this.



> Your top output shows 385M inactive and 95M free. That's fine. FreeBSD doesn't leave free memory laying around when it can keep something useful in it. When that memory is needed to run a new program, it's easily available.



I always run Apache, sbcl, Xorg, Firefox3, Thunderbird, emacs, some perl scripts, *and VirtualBox* in my system. If I start VirtualBox after I started other programs, the VirtualBox complains about "too low memory, unable to locate ... etc". I just run IE and Firefox in Windows and it had only 256MB memory assigned to it.



> On an Intel laptop? How?



I forgot to tell you, I have two laptops, one with intel video, and one nvidia. I installed Windows on the NVidia one, and FreeBSD on the intel one. I want to swap them now.


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## SirDice (Mar 18, 2011)

miniqq said:
			
		

> because the RES more than 256MB, if it located in VideoMemory, it should not be so high. if use NVidia ,it just 10 to 50 MB, or less.


This has nothing to do with video memory.



> if i start Vbox after started others, the vbox complained "too low memory, unable to locate ... etc", I just run IE and firefox in windows and had assign only 256MB memory to it.


How much memory does the machine have?


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## miniqq (Mar 18, 2011)

> How much memory does the machine have?



1G memory.



> This has nothing to do with video memory.



True? But why so much difference?

Today, I booted this laptop (intel video card) using a usb stick which installed OpenBSD 4.7. I started X , and *top* shows only 29MB RES, 61MB SIZE used by Xorg. I used the same configuration in xorg.conf both OpenBSD and FreeBSD.


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## wblock@ (Mar 18, 2011)

miniqq said:
			
		

> *and VirtualBox* in my system.
> if i start Vbox after started others, the vbox complained "too low memory, unable to locate ... etc", I just run  IE and firefox in windows and had assign only 256MB memory to it.



VirtualBox is a little different.  It has to allocate the amount of memory assigned to the VM.  If your VM system is set to have 512M of RAM, VirtualBox is going to want that, possibly in a contiguous chunk that isn't available after all your other software has been started.

You might be able to reduce the amount of shared video memory in the BIOS, or the amount allocated by the video driver in xorg.conf.  Adding some memory to the laptop wouldn't hurt, either.


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