Did i get cheated by seller or find a really weird memory bug? Only half of the memory shown.

[FailedTheCaptcha]

Armbianmonitor:

https://file.io/LfuZid2jBx7W

Hi everyone!

 

I bought a while a go few Rock Pi 4's  for as a testing purpose and today while doing some laaarge malloc's it failed in really interesting manner; run out of memory. I did some stumbling with the code and did not find any bugs, so i looked for htop and was a very much suprised to see that my 2GB model has only 1GB total, /proc/meminfo reports same!

Is this somekind of arm-specific thing that i do not just know?

 

Memory chips (there is two of them) on the board is: NCLD4C1MA256M32

https://dl.vamrs.com/products/rock960/docs/hw/datasheets/FORESEE_LPDDR4_200ball_NCLD4CXMAXXXM32_10x14.5_VFBGA_Spec_B1_20170802.pdf

 

256Mb * 32 / 8 * 2 would be 2048MB right?

 

I'm very interested of what my 4GB version has to say about it's memory size. :D

 

Just wtf?

[JMCC]

Sounds weird. And even more weird, the link to the armbianmonitor output is broken  Can you post another one? That will increase the chances to figure out the problem.

 

Also if you are using legacy kernel, try with current, or vice versa.

[FailedTheCaptcha]

Sorry about that thing with log, i did expect too much from the random filesharing service provider. Good old tools are the best. :-)

 

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1e7xk8RYOmbeskpuRb1I8sMMwKVniLzsN?usp=sharing

 

Can you get files now? I included some photos also, in case..

 

4GB model, well it seams to have 2GB of ram. I did ask from seller and they were like ímmediately offering to give money back. I did ask them if they have encountered more of these kind of boards, but they havent replyed yet. Just makes me wondering even more.

 

Does that zram thingy start hogging memory so early in the boot that it wont show up in boot log? And howto disable, i mean get rid of completly?

 

These arm boards are so new technology that everthing seems alien to me. :/

[ScottP]

can disable zram in /etc/default/armbian-zram-config - I dont see need for it with 4GB ram and some swap on SSD, idea is likely to preserve sdcards and emmc on systems with low memory

on rk3399 some memory is reserved for GPU/VPU I think so on nanopc T4:

U-Boot 2020.10-armbian (Mar 08 2021 - 17:46:43 +0000)

SoC: Rockchip rk3399
Reset cause: RST
Model: FriendlyElec NanoPC-T4
DRAM:  3.9 GiB

 

[tparys]

In case there's some sort of rare RK3399 memory issue ...

 

https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16889-nanopi-m4v2-only-2gb-ram-reported/

[FailedTheCaptcha]

Well, the vendor from which i did order the boards, did refund me.

So i did order a two 4GB A versions from different vendor, works flawlesly! Chips on them are from hynix.

 

My quess is that vendor has messed and switched dram chips on silkscreen printing. Or that producer has been viktim of forgery, wouldn't be suprised if that is the case.

 

Anyway, end of the drama from my part.