What is "Hardware Reserved"?

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Lumia925

Lumia925

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Oct 16, 2014
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Is it graphics?
It's HD graphics 3000 on the second gen i3. If it's graphics, shouldn't it be more than just 65.6MB?
Also, what should the ideal page file size be? I was using the (1.5 *physical) calculation, that gives 12 GB, I set it to 10000MB, but even this is too much it looks like..
I set PF to manual to avoid fragmenting the PF. If I set PF to automatic, the PF fragments to 2 or 3 pieces after a month..
 
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Hi,

When the computer is powered on, the system firmware (BIOS/UEFI) initializes the memory and peripherals. Part of this process involves creating a relationship between the method of accessing memory (the physical address space), and the memory itself.

The firmware may...
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Marklamarkle

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Feb 23, 2014
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Hardware reserved RAM is what Windows has calculated that it will need to run the hardware. For example if you are running a lot of programs and all of your 7.9GB of RAM if used up, the PC will still be able to function because the hardware still has the required amount of RAM to function.

10GB is probably overkill for a page file size, but you shouldn't need to worry about it. Leave it as it is unless you are pushed for disk space, and in that case just set it to automatic.
 
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Pinhedd

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Hi,

When the computer is powered on, the system firmware (BIOS/UEFI) initializes the memory and peripherals. Part of this process involves creating a relationship between the method of accessing memory (the physical address space), and the memory itself.

The firmware may reserve some of the memory itself for use by hardware. The biggest offender here is typically an IGP if one is present.

Memory is also reserved for the platform's management engine, which is a component of the chipset that controls platform features independent of the main operating system. The management engine is a small embedded microprocessor (not x86 based) with its own operating system that shares the physical address space with the CPU.

The firmware also allocates memory addresses (not memory itself) for PCI and PCIe devices. For compatibility reasons, this region of memory is aligned to the top of the lower 4GiB of the physical address space. Physical memory that would otherwise occupy this region is displaced; to make this memory accessible, most motherboards remap it to a location higher in the address space.

In total, about 20MiB to 60MiB of memory is rendered inaccessible to the operating system. The operating system can tell that it's there by looking at the DIMM SPDs and firmware tables but that operating system is not permitted to access or manage the memory in those regions.
 
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