How much memory do you REALLY have?

Something looked funny when I did a WEKSYSSTS on my new box.  Turns out
the numbers don't add up to a full gigabyte.  And in fact, when I went
in to WRKSHRPOOL, it brazenly told me I had 876MB.  A quick check of
DSPHDWRSC showed 4 fully functional 256MB cards, so I was a little
confused.  I called my good friends at 1-800-IBM-SERV, and got the most
confused little tale I ever heard.

It seems that people have been setting their machine pools too small,
and this was causing system hangs.  So many people were doing this that
they had to stop it.  So was the answer to simply change the program to
stop people from making the pool to small?  Of course not.  Instead,
they changed the system to LIE to you.  It hides some of your memory in
the machine pool so that even if you make your machine pool too small,
it won't hang the box.

Or at least, that's what the tech support guy said that a developer had
told him.  So I asked, how much of my memory is "hidden"?  How does it
figure out how much to hide?  Will it hide more when I add a second GB?
He had no answers, but he says he'll get back to me.

In the meantime, I'm asking people to check their machines.  Go into
WRKSHRPOOL and see if the amount reported matches what you bought.  I'll
be interested to see what the results are.

Joe

P.S. One tech told me it might be partitioning, but I said that couldn't
be it since I only have one partition, no HMC and a twinax console.
Then he said it might be the Ethernet card taking up memory.  It's clear
nobody but the guy who wrote the code knows what's going on here, so I'm
waiting to find out more.