Star64: 4GB on 8GB boards

[Der Geist der Maschine]

I have 8 GB of physical memory and I get that on Fishwaldo's image.

When using his kernel, modules and device tree from https://github.com/Fishwaldo/Star64_linux on Armbian https://www.armbian.com/star64/, I get only 4 GB of physical memory.

Code:

root@star64:/usr/src/linux# dmesg | grep Memory
[    0.000000] Memory: 2970040K/4192256K available (10967K kernel code, 7217K rwdata, 4096K rodata, 2189K init, 405K bss, 435784K reserved, 786432K cma-reserved)

Note, in these early days, Fishwaldo's kernel is a must-have way superior over other kernels.

I have not familiarized myself with the ins and outs of the boot process and don't understand where it fails on Armbian and perhaps other distributions.

The easiest workaround is setting the memory requirements to 8GB in the device tree

Code:

root@star64:/usr/src/linux# git diff
diff --git a/arch/riscv/boot/dts/starfive/jh7110-pine64-star64.dtsi b/arch/riscv/boot/dts/starfive/jh7110-pine64-star64.dtsi
index a6517cb4178a..d39e1377db73 100755
--- a/arch/riscv/boot/dts/starfive/jh7110-pine64-star64.dtsi
+++ b/arch/riscv/boot/dts/starfive/jh7110-pine64-star64.dtsi
@@ -47,7 +47,7 @@ cpus {

        memory@40000000 {
                device_type = "memory";
-              reg = <0x0 0x40000000 0x1 0x0>;
+              reg = <0x0 0x40000000 0x2 0x0>;
        };

        reserved-memory {

After applying above patch, rebuild the device tree as usual:

Code:

root@star64:/usr/src/linux# make starfive/jh7110-pine64-star64.dtb
root@star64:/usr/src/linux# cp arch/riscv/boot/dts/starfive/jh7110-pine64-star64.dtb /boot/dtb/starfive/jh7110-star64-pine64.dtb
root@star64:/usr/src/linux# reboot

This patch against Fishwaldo's kernel gives me 8 GB of memory on Armbian:

Code:

root@star64:/usr/src/linux# dmesg | grep Memory
[    0.000000] Memory: 7100836K/8386560K available (10967K kernel code, 7217K rwdata, 4096K rodata, 2189K init, 405K bss, 499292K reserved, 786432K cma-reserved)