The 830MB RAM limit has been removed, but just like any 32-bit OS without bad tricks,
GNU Mach can not cope well with lots of memory. Latest versions of the Debian gnumach
package will limit themselves to 3 GiB of memory. If you want more, you can twiddle
the VM_MAX_ADDRESS
limit between kernelland and userland in
i386/include/mach/i386/vm_param.h
, but glibc and the hurd servers will not cope
well with less than 1 GB.
There is a 64-bit port in progress.
If you have an older version, or still experience problems with vmstat
(see
above) reported much less memory than you have, the best is to limit the memory
it can see via GRUB's upppermem
feature. Add uppermem 786432
to GRUB's Hurd
entry in menu.lst
.