I ordered the MNT Reform DIY kit from Crowd Supply several weeks ago. The kit arrived in good condition and was well-packed.
The assembly process, first boot and updates all went smoothly. When I started to check the system out, I noticed that I might be missing 2GB of RAM… Please see the screenshots below.
o0 this is mega odd. What system do you have? Can you show the output of sudo reform-check and maybe also of free -m? Thank you!
Hi, it sounds like this is an i.MX8MQ system? I wonder if somehow a 2GB RAM version of the i.MX8MQ ended up in there, or the wrong u-boot version?
Hi. The output from free -m (bot including my user account name) is:
Okay, so this is indeed imx8mq reform. To make sure that this is not a u-boot issue, you could try running sudo reform-flash-uboot emmc as suggested by the reform-check output.
Your screenshot does not contain the full output of reform-check. It helps to copypaste from the terminal (you can do that either by right-clicking and choosing “copy” from the context menu, by pressing ctrl+shift+C or by using select and middle-mouse-button-paste). Copypasting text instead of showing a screenshot also makes your output easier to search and allows me to quote it directly.
Have you been using this system a lot already? The output suggests that the system that was pre-installed on your eMMC is quite ancient and it might be tricky to upgrade it. It would be easiest to start from scratch. Are you running from eMMC or SD-card (the full reform-check output would contain that information).
If you want to keep using that system, make sure to set a root password as suggested by the reform-check output (third to last line).
Hi. I ran sudo reform-flash-uboot emmc and it updated a file. I then ran sudo reform-check and pasted below the terminal output. It appears only slightly different from the output posted in my previous screenshot.
I haven’t done any development or made many new files and changes. If I have to reinstall everything, I am willing to do that to see if it helps find the other 2GB of RAM.
E: /etc/flash-kernel/machine does not exist
I: not installed: apt-config-icons-large arc-theme ardour breeze-icon-theme cage chromium dosbox emacs eog evolution ffmpeg firefox-esr freecad gimp git gnome-control-center gnome-session imagemagick-6.q16 iputils-ping kde-plasma-desktop kicad libreoffice libreoffice-gtk3 linphone-desktop openjdk-11-jre-headless plasma-discover plasma-nm plasma-workspace-wayland powerdevil pulseaudio qtwayland5 rofi scummvm systemsettings wayvnc wev wf-recorder wmaker x11-utils xfce4-terminal
W: /dev/mmcblk0p2 doesn’t exist. Your eMMC still contains a sysimage before v3
W: To update your eMMC to sysimage-v3 you can run reform-flash-rescue
W: Only run reform-flash-rescue if you intend a factory-reset of your eMMC
W: Do not use reform-flash-rescue if you boot from eMMC because this will overwrite your /boot partition
E: /etc/flash-kernel/machine doesn’t exist
E: It should contain either ‘MNT Reform 2’ (for single display) or ‘MNT Reform 2 HDMI’ (for dual display).
E: You can run reform-display-config as root to create a working version.
W: unexpected content in /etc/default/flash-kernel:
— - 2025-06-28 23:56:15.082142697 +0200
+++ /etc/default/flash-kernel 2023-09-12 20:10:55.000000000 +0200
@@ -1,2 +1,2 @@
-LINUX_KERNEL_CMDLINE=“console=ttymxc0,115200 console=tty1”
-LINUX_KERNEL_CMDLINE_DEFAULTS=“ro no_console_suspend cma=512M pci=nomsi”
+LINUX_KERNEL_CMDLINE=“console=ttymxc0,115200 console=ttyAML0,115200 console=tty1”
+LINUX_KERNEL_CMDLINE_DEFAULTS=“ro no_console_suspend cma=512M pci=nomsi,pcie_bus_perf libata.force=noncq nvme_core.default_ps_max_latency_us=0 cryptomgr.notests”
E: root account has no password (maybe run passwd -l root)
I: the following files differ from how they are shipped by reform-tools:
??5??? /var/lib/alsa/asound.state
Are you sure that this is the complete output? There should be more output before the first line you pasted.
In any case, the output that you did paste suggests that you are now on the latest u-boot for imx8mq. If you are till only seeing 2 GB of RAM then I’m out of ideas and maybe @minute was right and you somehow got a 2 GB ram version of the i.MX 8MQ?
I ran sudo reform-check in the terminal that is immediately after logging in (the one with the MNT logo) and also in a terminal opened from within sway. In both cases, there was no output before the line starting with "E: "
Maybe you have not upgraded for a while? What is your version of the reform-tools package? You can find out like this:
dpkg-query --showformat ‘${Version}\n’ --show reform-tools
or like this:
apt-cache policy reform-tools
installed version 1.25
To check whether your u-boot is up-to-date you should use a recent version of reform-tools. Your version is from two years ago (July 2023). We are now at version 1.74. Could you flash an up-to-date system image to an sd-card and boot that?
I’m happy to report that after updating my system to the latest image, I can see all 4GB of RAM now!
Thanks so much for the help! 