Memory Issues: /proc/kcore vs. free

[Christopher L. Rogers]

folks:

i am trying to determine whether or not i have
some bad memory or not on some of my beowulf nodes.
One thing i noticed right away is that ls -l of /proc/kcore
maxs out at 940 MB for physical ram greater than 1 GB.

I'm running 2048 MB, which the bios detects. free reports
2074 MB but as i said earlier /proc/kcore reports 940 MB.
(i do have mem=2048M appended in my lilo.conf)

So is this cause for alarm? Which is the true amount the
system sees? I need to routinely run jobs on these nodes
that are about 1 to 1.25 GB., so it makes a difference.

The system in question is a dual PIII Supermicro 370DL3
with their latest bios. The bios reports the 2 GB of ram
as PC133, and the vendor claims it's true registered ECC. 
The kernel is a stock Redhat 7.0 "enterprise" kernel
(2.2.16-22enterprise)

Thanks for all your help.

-Chris Rogers
crogers at sas.upenn.edu