reduced memory, kernel problems?

I had one server with 2GB of total memory. It was running fine with RH Linux 6.2 with kernel version of 2.2.18pre1 (I believe). At one point (around end of November last year), the kernel was upgraded to 2.4.16. I just realized on early January that for some reasons the total memory on the server accessible to the OS has reduced to 896MB. The following is the output from dmesg:

Linux version 2.4.16 (root@xx.yy.zz) (gcc version egcs-2.91.66 19990314/Linux (egcs-1.1.2 release)) #1 Thu Nov 29 19:39:04 EST 2001
BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
BIOS-e820: 0000000000000000 - 000000000009fc00 (usable)
BIOS-e820: 000000000009fc00 - 00000000000a0000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 00000000000e0000 - 0000000000100000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 0000000000100000 - 000000007f800000 (usable)
BIOS-e820: 00000000fec00000 - 00000000fec01000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 00000000fee00000 - 00000000fee01000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 00000000fffc0000 - 0000000100000000 (reserved)
Warning only 896MB will be used.
Use a HIGHMEM enabled kernel.
On node 0 totalpages: 229376
zone(0): 4096 pages.
zone(1): 225280 pages.
zone(2): 0 pages.
I don't think somebody has tweaked the BIOS to cause this since the server has been practically 100% up since September besides few minutes total of reboot time (don't think there was enough time for somebody to tweak the BIOS setting).

Does anybody ever have similar experience like this? What may have caused this reduced physical memory? Any help/hint/suggestion will be appreciated much. Thank you ...

cheers,
reduced memory, kernel problems?

 

 

 

 

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