Memavail - test for OS/2 useable memory.
Author: Tom Stearns 76467,3344

Freeware, distribute as you please. I bear no responsibility for the
use of this program.

This little ditty stems from a discussion with our esteemed Sysop,
Irv. The subject was the use of memory above 16Mb as contiguous RAM
as opposed to caching the memory paging system. From this discussion
comes the current status of OS/2 as of 6/7/92 which is that only DMA
accessable RAM is useable by OS/2 as contiguous RAM. According to Irv
BIOS Int 15h, subfunction 88h will report this DMA accessable RAM.

To run this program boot DOS (you must run it in native DOS, you can
run it in a VDM but you'll get an non-sensical result). According to
Irv programs like VDISK cannot be loaded. I would suspect that any
DOS extender like QEMM would also cause an invalid reading. Just to
be sure boot a vanilla DOS and run memavail. The result is the amount
of RAM above 1MB so add 1 meg to the numbers to get the total RAM.

I don't have any >16MB machines to test this on right now but from my
discussion from Irv this is the ticket. If you show >15MB (remember
first MB) then OS/2 will use this as contiguous RAM. If your >16MB
machine shows 15,360 blocks (15MB) then it will not.

Lastly, to quote Irv one more time, this is being looked into very
seriously at IBM.

Thanks Irv.

Tom Stearns