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I have a Lenovo Thinkcentre M78 Tower Desktop. In the BIOS it says I have 8192 MB of Installed Memory. However, when I run free -m in Xubuntu 14.04 it says I only have 7111 MB of memory. It seems the BIOS is reserving about 1 GB of my RAM.

To try to remedy this issue, in the BIOS I went into Video Setup and changed the UMA Frame Buffer size from Auto to the minimum value of 32M (image below). This then bricked my BIOS which I was able to reset and fix. I thought this was the setting for memory size for the integrated graphics card that I do not use. I use a discreet card which is set as the main card PEG (PCI Express Graphics) in BIOS.

Could I possibly change the UMA Frame Buffer size to a different number that does not brick my BIOS? If at all possible, I'd like to avoid bricking my BIOS, no fun to do that. By the way, I also have Linux Mint 17 and it also shows the same amount of RAM availability as Xubuntu 14.04. Any input would be much appreciated.

Update: I ran free -m from an install disk and with the integrated graphics set as primary in the BIOS. I had the same result of 7111 MB of memory available. So this seems that 1 GB is reserved no matter which card is primary in BIOS or which is being used.

Lenovo BIOS UMA Frame Buffer size

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  • There seems to be a similar question over here: askubuntu.com/questions/364901/…
    – joshumax
    May 20, 2015 at 3:28
  • It is OK. Your integrated video adapter uses some RAM.
    – Pilot6
    May 20, 2015 at 7:58
  • Would you say that this is definitely only the integrated card for which this RAM is reserved by BIOS and not the discrete card that I actually use? Thanks
    – jbrock
    May 23, 2015 at 1:39

1 Answer 1

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I realized that the BIOS Surround View setting was not necessary for my triple monitor setup. This setting is only necessary if I were using Windows. I disabled this setting. Now free -m says 7867 MB of memory. So, that setting was reserving quite a bit of memory.

However, after disabling the Surround View setting in BIOS, the triple monitor layout display settings are not preserved after logging out. To fix this, I arranged my displays with arandr, exported the display layout script, and then added it to Session and Startup (Xfce).

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