# Dell Poweredge R710 Memory / BIOS Update?



## Kevin Plummer (Apr 25, 2016)

Hi, I am running a Dell R710 Poweredge Server with FreeBSD 10.3.  Currently I have 48 GB of physical memory in the server.  However I am getting the following, and it appears that not all of the memory is showing up correctly.  In `dmesg` I see the following:
	
	



```
real memory  = 51539607552 (49152 MB)
     avail memory = 1808547840 (1724 MB)
```
At first I thought maybe it was bad memory, but I have three other servers that are the same and they are all three showing the same issues.  I thought about updating the BIOS, however I am not sure how to update the BIOS since the update is for Windows.  Dell does have a .BIN file for Linux, but I wasnt sure if I could use this to update on FreeBSD or not?

Any help would greatly be appreciated.


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## SirDice (Apr 25, 2016)

Is this on 64 bit or 32?


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## Terry_Kennedy (May 2, 2016)

Kevin Plummer said:


> Hi, I am running a Dell R710 Poweredge Server with FreeBSD 10.3.  Currently I have 48 GB of physical memory in the server.  However I am getting the following, and it appears that not all of the memory is showing up correctly.  In `dmesg` I see the following:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


That looks like you're running the i386 platform, not amd64. What does `# uname -m` say? If it says "amd64", then we'll need to look at your /boot/loader.conf file to see if you're doing anything that would gobble up a lot of memory. It is also possible for systems to report strange memory mapping (if you do a verbose kernel boot, the memory map is one of the first things output), but the R710 is a solid platform and I wouldn't expect to see any problems like this. I have a number of R710 systems happily running various FreeBSD with large amounts of installed memory.



> I thought about updating the BIOS, however I am not sure how to update the BIOS since the update is for Windows.  Dell does have a .BIN file for Linux, but I wasnt sure if I could use this to update on FreeBSD or not?


It won't run under FreeBSD's Linux compatibility - most firmware update things expect low-level features the Linuxulator doesn't provide.

However, you can create bootable discs and just boot and run the R710 update utility that way. I normally boot from the Dell CDU CD (it is obsolete - the latest version is cdu_2.2_core_702.iso), but it is small,  lightweight, and has a nice menu. You'll also need a SUU DVD, which is incredibly big and bloated, since it has updates for _everything_. See my "De-bloating the Dell Server Update Utility" series of blog posts for more info. Note that the latest SUU has been split into Windows and Linux versions, but *still* doesn't fit on a double-layer DVD.

As an alternative, you can just download the "Update package for Linux" version of each of the firmware updates to a USB drive, boot the CDU and get a shell via F3, then run each update manually. The advantage of the SUU is that it will update everything, even hardware you didn't know you had.


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