Intel VGA shared memory

Question

I have a G41 motherboard with 256 MB intel VGA. When memory shared from RAM on Windows it can be ~740MB, but on Fedora 15.0, it is just 256.

Is there a way to make it work on Linux the same as on Windows?

$ lspci -v -s 00:02.0

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])

    Subsystem: Giga-byte Technology Device d000
    Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 42
    Memory at fd800000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
    Memory at d0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
    I/O ports at ff00 [size=8]
    Expansion ROM at  [disabled]
    Capabilities: 
    Kernel driver in use: i915
    Kernel modules: i915

Also: What is the boldfaced line for?

Answer 1

You'd just be wasting RAM. There's pretty much no way to usefully employ more than 256MB of shared RAM. The more RAM the graphics chipset uses, the slower it goes. Shared RAM is a tradeoff -- it improves image quality but drops frame rates in the toilet. These chipsets and drivers have heavy optimizations (such as texture compression) to minimize the amount of shared memory they use -- trying to force them to use more would be counter-productive.

This is not a "more is better" thing.