OCI: Memory discrepancy for the Linux Instance between OCI console and the ‘free’ Output

Applies To:
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Oracle Linux

Symptoms

Below are the instance details on the OCI Console:

"Shape":"VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro",

"OCPUs":1,"Memory (MB)":"1,024"
Display Name

Oracle-Linux-9.6-Minimal-2025.06.30-0

As per "Shape":"VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro", provides 1 GB of memory

dmidecode output from the OS also shows 1 GB

>> dmidecode
Physical Memory Array
        Location: Other
        Use: System Memory
        Error Correction Type: Multi-bit ECC
        Maximum Capacity: 1 GB. <<========
        Error Information Handle: Not Provided
        Number Of Devices: 1

But as per the below output , we see only 500MB total memory .

===========================
>>free
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:          516032      243008       31608        5672      259484      273024. <<======== 500MB
Swap:        4194300