Oh snap! My RPi was upgraded to 512MB! Woo-hoo!
- by hinkmond
I ordered a Raspberry Pi Model B (256MB) over 4 months ago on backorder. When it finally came I saw it was upgraded to the new half a gig model! Woot!
But, all was not perfect. Gary C. told me the shipped configuration of the new RPi models didn't have the right firmware for 512MB, and I had to upgrade the start.elf in the /boot directory to recognize all of the 512MB RAM. I did a "free" command, and sure enough saw only 240MB. Sadness. But, Gary gave me a copy of his start.elf which worked after some trail and error.
For anyone ordering the new RPi Model B w/512MB, here are the steps to get you going with full 512MB RAM:
sudo apt-get update --fix-missing
sudo apt-get upgrade --fix-missing
# NOTE: This step takes at least a couple hours on a
# fast network
wget https://raw.github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/\
164b0fe2b3b56081c7510df93bc1440aebe45f7e/boot/\
arm496_start.elf
sudo mv /boot/start.elf /boot/orig-start.elf
sudo mv arm496_start.elf /boot/start.elf
sudo reboot
free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 497768 210596 287172 0 16892 169624
-/+ buffers/cache: 24080 473688
Swap: 102396 0 102396
So of course this means... (drumroll) there is now 498MB available for the Java Embedded heap!
java -Xmx400m -version
java version "1.7.0_06"
Java(TM) SE Embedded Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_06-b24, headless)
Java HotSpot(TM) Embedded Client VM (build 23.2-b09, mixed mode)
Yeah, baby!
Hinkmond
