RAM? ramtrap?

QNX Newsgroups (Archives) qdn.public.qnxrtp.newuser
1

QNX only finds aproximately 16 of the 192mb of memory present on my
Compaq Presario 4824 (PII 233). QNX resides on its own parition,
booting directly w/ its bootloader and not from a win9x/DOS menu.
I’ve looked for memory or memory hole settings in the BIOS and found
none. I tried running ramtrap and got this error regaurdless of what
arguments I gave it:

/bin/ramtrap[1]: 8: not found
/bin/ramtrap[1]: R: not found
/bin/ramtrap[3]: %C: not found
/bin/ramtrap[4]: %C: not found
/bin/ramtrap[5]: Options:: not found
/bin/ramtrap[6]: syntax error: ‘(’ unexpected

Is there something wrong with ramtrap? Am I using it incorrectly? How
can I get QNX to find my memory?

Thanks,
DC

2

In qdn.public.qnxrtp.newuser maycat@pacbell.net wrote:

QNX only finds aproximately 16 of the 192mb of memory present on my
Compaq Presario 4824 (PII 233). QNX resides on its own parition,
booting directly w/ its bootloader and not from a win9x/DOS menu.
I’ve looked for memory or memory hole settings in the BIOS and found
none. I tried running ramtrap and got this error regaurdless of what
arguments I gave it:

/bin/ramtrap[1]: 8: not found
/bin/ramtrap[1]: R: not found
/bin/ramtrap[3]: %C: not found
/bin/ramtrap[4]: %C: not found
/bin/ramtrap[5]: Options:: not found
/bin/ramtrap[6]: syntax error: ‘(’ unexpected

Is there something wrong with ramtrap? Am I using it incorrectly? How
can I get QNX to find my memory?

Are you installing QNX4, RTP, or Neutrino? As far as I know, ramtrap only
existed for QNX4, and even there is no longer the recommended way for adding
memory to the system – the -M option to /boot/sys/boot (in your OS image)
is the recommended way.

The above looks like you tried to run a QNX4 ramtrap executable under
Neutrino or RTP. Did you have an already existing QNX4 installation that
you installed Neutrino over/along side?

As to how to actually get your machine to see all the memory – I don’t
know. But, more detail on exactly what you are installing would probably
help the people who might be able to answer your question.

-David

3

Are you installing QNX4, RTP, or Neutrino? As far as I know, ramtrap only
existed for QNX4, and even there is no longer the recommended way for adding
memory to the system – the -M option to /boot/sys/boot (in your OS image)
is the recommended way.

I installed QNX RTP from the CD onto a clean partition. There is a
WinNT 4.0 installation sharing the drive on another parition, and no
other/older installs of QNX have ever been on the machine (I’m new QNX).

Where do I add the -M option? /boot/sys/ contains:

drwxrwxr-x 2 root root 2048 Sep 11 16:32 .
drwxrwxr-x 4 root root 2048 Sep 11 16:32 ..
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root root 3676 Sep 01 06:56 bios.boot
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root root 3701 Sep 01 06:56 bios16m.boot
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root root 275 Feb 08 1998 nobios.boot
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root root 286023 Sep 13 18:09 procnto
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root root 292417 Sep 13 18:09 procnto-smp
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root root 56182 Sep 01 07:03 startup-bios

4

David was assuming QNX 4.x when he suggested the -M option. Ramtrap does not
exist on RTP. At least not on mine.

<maycat@pacbell.net> wrote in message news:3A03D1F0.447A0FD9@pacbell.net…

Are you installing QNX4, RTP, or Neutrino? As far as I know, ramtrap
only
existed for QNX4, and even there is no longer the recommended way for
adding
memory to the system – the -M option to /boot/sys/boot (in your OS
image)
is the recommended way.

I installed QNX RTP from the CD onto a clean partition. There is a
WinNT 4.0 installation sharing the drive on another parition, and no
other/older installs of QNX have ever been on the machine (I’m new QNX).

Where do I add the -M option? /boot/sys/ contains:

drwxrwxr-x 2 root root 2048 Sep 11 16:32 .
drwxrwxr-x 4 root root 2048 Sep 11 16:32 ..
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root root 3676 Sep 01 06:56 bios.boot
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root root 3701 Sep 01 06:56 bios16m.boot
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root root 275 Feb 08 1998 nobios.boot
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root root 286023 Sep 13 18:09 procnto
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root root 292417 Sep 13 18:09 procnto-smp
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root root 56182 Sep 01 07:03 startup-bios

5

In qdn.public.qnxrtp.newuser maycat@pacbell.net wrote:

Are you installing QNX4, RTP, or Neutrino? As far as I know, ramtrap only
existed for QNX4, and even there is no longer the recommended way for adding
memory to the system – the -M option to /boot/sys/boot (in your OS image)
is the recommended way.

I installed QNX RTP from the CD onto a clean partition. There is a
WinNT 4.0 installation sharing the drive on another parition, and no
other/older installs of QNX have ever been on the machine (I’m new QNX).

Where do I add the -M option? /boot/sys/ contains:

That option was for QNX4 – as ramtrap only existed under QNX4.

Hm… I don’t know how to go about getting QNX RTP to recognise
more memory – well, you could probably do it by modifying startup
to explicitly add the extra memory if you know where it resides, but
that is a bit of a nasty tool to try and wield.

Does the memory test at startup find & test all the memory? I know
our startup code generally queries the BIOS for available memory
information, and apparently your machine’s BIOS isn’t reporting all
that is available.

Can you wander through your BIOS settings – make sure that “Plug and
Play aware OS” or anything similar is disabled, and look at anything
else that might mention memory or otherwise be suspcious and try
fiddling that.

-David

6

David Gibbs wrote:

That option was for QNX4 – as ramtrap only existed under QNX4.

Hm… I don’t know how to go about getting QNX RTP to recognise
more memory – well, you could probably do it by modifying startup
to explicitly add the extra memory if you know where it resides, but
that is a bit of a nasty tool to try and wield.

Does the memory test at startup find & test all the memory? I know
our startup code generally queries the BIOS for available memory
information, and apparently your machine’s BIOS isn’t reporting all
that is available.

Can you wander through your BIOS settings – make sure that “Plug and
Play aware OS” or anything similar is disabled, and look at anything
else that might mention memory or otherwise be suspcious and try
fiddling that.

-David

I played with every BIOS setting vaguely related to memory or OS,
and a few others as well. The one that really seemed to do something
was labeled “Alternative memory reporting”. It was disabled when I
found it, so I tried enabling it. With it enabled, QNX now finds up
to 64mb of memory. I have two 32mb memory modules, and one 128mb.
I removed and rearranged them in a variety of ways, but QNX never saw
more than 64mb. WinNT, through all of this, always found the correct
amount of memory.

Semi-offtopic yet related question:
Why doesn’t Quake3 run on a system with 64mb of memory under QNX, when
it will under Windows and Linux?

7

<maycat@pacbell.net> wrote in message news:3A0759AA.42AEFD7@pacbell.net…

David Gibbs wrote:
That option was for QNX4 – as ramtrap only existed under QNX4.

Hm… I don’t know how to go about getting QNX RTP to recognise
more memory – well, you could probably do it by modifying startup
to explicitly add the extra memory if you know where it resides, but
that is a bit of a nasty tool to try and wield.

Does the memory test at startup find & test all the memory? I know
our startup code generally queries the BIOS for available memory
information, and apparently your machine’s BIOS isn’t reporting all
that is available.

Can you wander through your BIOS settings – make sure that “Plug and
Play aware OS” or anything similar is disabled, and look at anything
else that might mention memory or otherwise be suspcious and try
fiddling that.

-David

I played with every BIOS setting vaguely related to memory or OS,
and a few others as well. The one that really seemed to do something
was labeled “Alternative memory reporting”. It was disabled when I
found it, so I tried enabling it. With it enabled, QNX now finds up
to 64mb of memory. I have two 32mb memory modules, and one 128mb.
I removed and rearranged them in a variety of ways, but QNX never saw
more than 64mb. WinNT, through all of this, always found the correct
amount of memory.

Semi-offtopic yet related question:
Why doesn’t Quake3 run on a system with 64mb of memory under QNX, when
it will under Windows and Linux?

A couple of WAG’s here…

Compaq has always been weird about their hardware, and it wouldn’t surprise
me if they sent a patch to MicroSchlock so Windoze & NT would work. I’m
going to bet they don’t provide that sort of information to QNX, who has to
find out the hard way what’s going on, through reports such as the one you
just made. It’s been this way for a long time, which is why I never buy
Compaq hardware. They make great quality stuff with nice features, but they
tend towards the IBM tactic of making their stuff just a little bit
different for whatever reason, which means if you’re going anywhere but
MicroSquishy, you’re probably going to have trouble.

As for the Quake thing, I recall someone from QNX mentioning that swapping
is OFF by default, and you must use the “swapctl” utility to turn it on. So
perhaps Quake wants to swap on RtP but can’t (until you enable it), whereas
on Windoze it’ll swap by default. Remember that RtP is aimed at the
embedded, realtime market, where swapping is a 4-letter word.

-Warren

8

Warren Peece wrote:

Semi-offtopic yet related question:
Why doesn’t Quake3 run on a system with 64mb of memory under QNX, when
it will under Windows and Linux?

A couple of WAG’s here…

Compaq has always been weird about their hardware, and it wouldn’t surprise
me if they sent a patch to MicroSchlock so Windoze & NT would work. I’m
going to bet they don’t provide that sort of information to QNX, who has to
find out the hard way what’s going on, through reports such as the one you
just made. It’s been this way for a long time, which is why I never buy
Compaq hardware. They make great quality stuff with nice features, but they
tend towards the IBM tactic of making their stuff just a little bit
different for whatever reason, which means if you’re going anywhere but
MicroSquishy, you’re probably going to have trouble.

As for the Quake thing, I recall someone from QNX mentioning that swapping
is OFF by default, and you must use the “swapctl” utility to turn it on. So
perhaps Quake wants to swap on RtP but can’t (until you enable it), whereas
on Windoze it’ll swap by default. Remember that RtP is aimed at the
embedded, realtime market, where swapping is a 4-letter word.

Speaking about Quake, I ran into this already. The answer was, it simply
needs more memory on RTP. Experimentally it needs 85+ Mb of free RAM
before you start it. Playing with swapping settings does not help that
as it actually does swapping already. Problem is deeper, it is in
implementation of swapping. On RTP it is currently an ‘alien’ hack
added to system at latter time (i.e., not designed to be there from
ground up) pretty much just to support GCC. It is neither efficient nor
universally working. It happens to work with Quake but only to some
extent.

  • Igor