If this thread exists somewhere please advise. I have noticed that when ever I start up BOINC it checks the physical characteristics of the machine such as:

Sun 25 Mar 16:42:09 2007||Starting BOINC client version 5.8.15 for powerpc-apple-darwin
Sun 25 Mar 16:42:09 2007||log flags: task, file_xfer, sched_ops
Sun 25 Mar 16:42:09 2007||Libraries: libcurl/7.15.5 OpenSSL/0.9.7l zlib/1.2.3
Sun 25 Mar 16:42:09 2007||Data directory: /Library/Application Support/BOINC Data
Sun 25 Mar 16:42:09 2007||Processor: 2 Power Macintosh Power Macintosh [Power Macintosh Model PowerMac7,2] [AltiVec]
Sun 25 Mar 16:42:09 2007||Memory: 2.00 GB physical, 92.02 GB virtual
Sun 25 Mar 16:42:09 2007||Disk: 149.04 GB total, 91.77 GB free

Now recognizing that I have installed memory of 2.512 GB why does it say 2.00? It further states that I have only 91.77 GB free of disk space when I actually have installed more than 500 GB free. Does this affect the assignment of jobs to this machine? I am hoping to learn something here. Thanks in advance for your time.

Not knowing anything about Macs, my suggestions may be wrong:

* 2GB is the maximum number a 'signed 32bit integer' can hold. Perhaps some routine somewhere (either in Boinc or in the OS) returns the memory via that type of value rather than the more appropriate unsigned integer which can hold up to 4GB.

* Do you have one or more physical drives holding the 500GB? Boinc may be reporting the space free on the actual physical drive it's installed on, rather than the total space over all drives.

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I remember somebody who had 6GB (!) of RAM on his mac and it was reporting total RAM as 2GB. Charlie Fenton fixed it on 12 Mar 2007, I don't know what version of the client has the fix, though.

Charlie 12 Mar 2007
- Mac: add str_util.C,h to libboinc target of XCode project.
- CC: On Mac OS X, sysctl with selectors CTL_HW, HW_PHYSMEM returns only a
4-byte value, even if passed an 8-byte buffer, and limits the returned
value to 2GB when the actual RAM size is > 2GB. So use Mac-specific
API Gestalt(gestaltPhysicalRAMSizeInMegabytes, &mem_size) and add a
#error statement to the old method to alert any porters if their
platforms were using sysctl {CTL_HW, HW_PHYSMEM{.

Must be for version 5.8.18, if it ever comes, or go over into whatever 5.9.x version that's going to be alpha tested.

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