Reclaim Video Memory for Headless Server

Update on: Tue, 4 Oct 2022 by zackad

I bought a Beelink SER3 mini pc for my home server. It has 8GB memory and
256GB storage. Barely enough for my use case to run several service such as
vaultwarden, nextcloud, freshrss, plex media server and other thing. In the
future I might want to install gitlab or youtrack. For that I need to
upgrade the memory to atleast 16GB.

The thing is, it come pre-installed with windows 11 and from the marketing
material it is intended for lightweight desktop usage (office suite, watch
video) and boasting to be able running at 4K resolution. No wonder that the
allocated video memory from RAM is around 2GB. I notice that after
replacing
windows with archlinux the main memory only read as 5.xGB. I always thought
that video memory is done by OS, it turn out I need to configure it in the
BIOS. Here’s the setting

Enter Bios mode (restart pc and pres del key), and select Advanced Tab,
then select AMD CBS
    
    Figure 1: Advance Tabs
Select NBIO Common Options
    
    Figure 2: NBIO Common Options
Select GFX Configuration
    
    Figure 3: GFX Configuration
Change following options
        Integrated Graphics Controller -> Forces
        UMA Mode -> UMA_SPECIFIED
        UMA Version -> AUTO
        UMA Frame Buffer Size -> SELECT_YOUR_CHOISE (I run this pc as
headless server, the smallest choice is 64MB) To be safe I choose 128MB,
might need to install DE later on.
    
        Figure 4: UMA Configuration