Re: Large memory system

Stephen C. Tweedie
1999-02-08T11:22:36Z

Hi,

On Sat, 30 Jan 1999 08:36:31 -0500, Daniel Blakeley
<daniel@msc.cornell.edu> said:

> I've jumped the gun a little bit and recommended a Professor buy 4GB
> of RAM on a Xeon machine to run Linux on and he did. After he got it
> I read the large memory howto which states that the max memory size
> for Linux 2.2.x is 2GB physical/2GB virtual. The memory size seems to
> limited by the 32bit nature of the x86 architecture. The Xeon seems
> to have a 36bit memory addressing mode. Can Linux be easily expanded
> to use the 36bit addressing?

It's not exactly trivial, but it can (and will) be done. For now, you
can only use 4G on a 64-bit architecture (Alpha or Sparc64), but
basically we know how to address it on Intel too, transparently to the
user.

--Stephen