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I just bought a brand new hp laptop with 8Gb(2x4Gb) RAM. After installing ubuntu 20.04(as a single system), i noticed that htop shows just 5,9 Gb of memory and 2Gb swap. Am i an idiot or there are 2 Gb missing? If so, how do i get them back? BIOS shows all 8 Gb, whereas htop, vmstat -s and free -m all show the same 5,9 Gb. All the similar questions had obvious x86/x64 issues or some sticks missing whatsoever, so i'm at a loss here.

grango
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    That's an awful lot, but is some reserved for on-board graphics? – KGIII Oct 26 '20 at 01:43
  • @KGIII `lspci` says vga controller has 256 M so it shouldn't be an issue – grango Oct 26 '20 at 13:18
  • This is a mystery. What are the chances that the motherboard only supports 6 GB of RAM? See [here](https://askubuntu.com/questions/974543/ubuntu-on-x64-sees-2g-of-12g-ram-installed) for example. But, 6 GB is an odd number. 2, 4, 8, 16 is the usual progression. – KGIII Oct 26 '20 at 15:44
  • @KGIII I would've thought so too, if only bios did't see all 8 gb. I have some doubts about sticks, maybe some driver problem and whatnot. Once I have money I'll try buying 2x8Gb and checking if another set of sticks will help. But for now all i can do is wait for an answer here – grango Oct 26 '20 at 19:06
  • If you check the link, in that odd case, their BIOS also saw the full amount of RAM - as did at least one other application that read the data from the BIOS directly - while *inside* the operating system. So, in theory at least, you could have a 6 GB limit and still have the BIOS show the full amount, but then limit the amount the OS can actually use. I've never seen it in-person before **AND** 6 GB would be an unusual limit. So, it's something to explore. What HP model/model numbers are we working with here for your laptop? The specs will be online somewhere and we can maybe rule that out. – KGIII Oct 26 '20 at 19:12
  • So this is a HP 17-ca1xxx with a 85B3 motherboard, ryzen 3500U and two A-Data 4Gb SO-DIMM sticks. It was not opened so everything hardware-related was from manufacturer – grango Oct 26 '20 at 19:59
  • Thanks. We can eliminate that as a possibility. Your motherboard can support up to 16 GB of RAM. I found the specs [here](https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c05105945), if you'd like to read them/bookmark the link. Maybe someone else will know, but we've eliminated that. It *might* be worth investing the time to run memtest. There's no software reason that should cause this, as in no inherent OS limitations or anything of that nature. So, I really lean towards it being a hardware issue. – KGIII Oct 26 '20 at 20:09
  • Thanks. It's probably the faulty chinese memory, so i'll just try buying new set of sticks asap. – grango Oct 26 '20 at 20:16
  • There's memtest, so you can just test it. It's easy enough to do and already installed as a part of your OS. Directions are [here](https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MemoryTest). – KGIII Oct 26 '20 at 20:20
  • memtest says i have the same 5,9 gb. – grango Oct 26 '20 at 21:18
  • Yeah, I suspect it's a hardware issue. You can try contacting HP, seeing as it's new, and they'll probably either send you new RAM or want you to send it in for repair. – KGIII Oct 26 '20 at 21:30

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