Available Memory on Nexus One

[Guest cezent]

Hi all,

Have been playing with the Nexus One for a couple of days now. One thing i ve noticed is that when I use TasKiller to check the available memory, its only around 70mb most of the time, and that's after I killed all the non-core apps!

That's not a lot compare to HTC Hero given that Nexus One has 512MB RAM, and Hero has Sense UI ran at the background on top of everything else. I mean the speed of N1 is lightningly fast, I would thought the available memory should be a lot higher.

Any thoughts?

[Guest FLT]

It's currently limited by the kernel and will be patched in the next update wich should give 100-150MB more RAM

[Guest cezent]

It's currently limited by the kernel and will be patched in the next update wich should give 100-150MB more RAM

By next update u mean the next update released by google? or 3rd party custom update?

[Guest Mantisen]

By next update u mean the next update released by google? or 3rd party custom update?

Someone over at xda chatted with google who said it will be fixed on next update, so should be google update. :)

[Guest kam187]

Someone over at xda chatted with google who said it will be fixed on next update, so should be google update. :)

Hmm isnt it a limitation in the .29 kernel? So that'll mean .32 kernal for the fix?

[Guest packetlss]

Hmm isnt it a limitation in the .29 kernel? So that'll mean .32 kernal for the fix?

Yup.

Roughly 220MB is available to userspace in the shipping build (ERD79).

Quite a lot of memory is dedicated to the radio firmware (41MB), dsp firmware (32MB), display surfaces (32MB), gpu (3MB), camera (8MB), a/v buffers (41MB), and dsp buffers. Much of this needs to be set aside for these specific tasks due to hardware requirements of very large physically contiguous buffers which can be difficult or impossible to obtain after boot once the physical memory space gets fragmented.

The big limitation though is that the Linux kernel needs to do a 1:1 physical:virtual map of general purpose memory used by the kernel and userspace (which excludes the special purpose stuff described above). This eats into the available kernel virtual address space, which is also needed for cross process shared memory used by the binder, etc. Run out of virtual memory and things get unhappy.

In 2.6.32, HIGHMEM support for ARM will allow us to avoid this requirement for a 1:1 mapping which will allow us to increase memory available to userspace without running the system out of virtual memory adddress space.

[Guest cezent]

Wow, that seems to be quite a huge bug if they actually release it without realizing the phone is not utlizing most of the memory...or perhaps they did it on purpose...anyway, i hope they release the update soon, its kind of disappointing knowing that half the memory on the phone are still hibernating!

and also, does anyone know how the update is gonna roll out? there is currently no carrier support in UK i m not sure if there will be OTA update since no network will push it in UK...

[Guest joners]

Wow, that seems to be quite a huge bug if they actually release it without realizing the phone is not utlizing most of the memory...or perhaps they did it on purpose...anyway, i hope they release the update soon, its kind of disappointing knowing that half the memory on the phone are still hibernating!

and also, does anyone know how the update is gonna roll out? there is currently no carrier support in UK i m not sure if there will be OTA update since no network will push it in UK...

I know what you mean, i think that google thought that the product was good enough to ship, however I think its a good phone now, and will be a great one once they release the 2.1.x OTA with all the necessary bug fixes etc.

[Guest zeus_hunt]

cyanogen

For the adventurous: Google's 2.6.32 kernel will boot on N1, but the light sensor doesn't work. It's a screamer though. I'll probably be basing any ROM images off that in the future.