8.04 Hardy Heron, only 8MB RAM being used for Video Memory

**kripz** · May 10th, 2008

Im told in hardy heron, X uses a minimalist configuration or something so my xorg.conf appears to be unconfigured, but X is configured and using the intel driver. (aparently)

However, its only using 8MB of my ram for video memory (dmesg | grep agpgart) when i have 2gb free and in bios it is set (and unchangeable) to 128mb (and in brackets next to it, it says Windows XP only, not that i think that matters?).

Whats going on?

# xorg.conf (X.Org X Window System server configuration file)
#
# This file was generated by dexconf, the Debian X Configuration tool, using
# values from the debconf database.
#
# Edit this file with caution, and see the xorg.conf manual page.
# (Type "man xorg.conf" at the shell prompt.)
#
# This file is automatically updated on xserver-xorg package upgrades *only*
# if it has not been modified since the last upgrade of the xserver-xorg
# package.
#
# If you have edited this file but would like it to be automatically updated
# again, run the following command:
# sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Generic Keyboard"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "CorePointer"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "HorizEdgeScroll" "0"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "intel"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Configured Monitor"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Monitor "Configured Monitor"
Device "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen "Default Screen"
InputDevice "Synaptics Touchpad"
EndSection

**pytheas22** · May 10th, 2008

Yeah, apparently Hardy does crazy new stuff with xorg.conf. But I've read that you can still specify values to override the auto-detected settings.

From http://linux.die.net/man/5/xorg.conf :

VideoRam mem
This optional entry specifies the amount of video ram that is installed on the graphics board. This is measured in kBytes. In most cases this is not required because the Xorg server probes the graphics board to determine this quantity. The driver-specific documentation should indicate when it might be needed.

So you should be able to add this in to the device section to force it to use more memory, I think, although it's not entirely clear whether this works for integrated video cards as well as ones with dedicated vram.

**pytheas22** · May 11th, 2008

Actually I'm not sure that the value in dmesg is really anything to worry about. I also get:

Code:

 dmesg | grep agpgart
[   21.199549] Linux agpgart interface v0.102
[   30.452976] agpgart: Detected an Intel 945G Chipset.
[   30.453854] agpgart: Detected 7932K stolen memory.
[   30.476255] agpgart: AGP aperture is 256M @ 0xd0000000

But it's impossible that the card is only using 8 megabytes of memory; otherwise hardware acceleration wouldn't be working.

I'm not sure how to tell how much memory the card is really using, but I'd say that if things are working alright, you should't worry.