Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 30 Jul 1999 23:40:24 +0200 | From | Matthew Wilcox <> | Subject | Re: Addressing more than 2 Gig of Memory |
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On Fri, Jul 30, 1999 at 03:18:12PM -0500, mikosh@austin.ibm.com wrote: > >> I understand that there may be a Linux kernel patch available that > >> increases the maximum amount of addressable memory beyond 2 gigabytes. > >> > >> Do you know of such a patch for the 2.2 kernel? > > >If you're talking about the 36 bit memory support, such a patch does not > >exist yet -- to the best of my knowledge it's still in the 'napkin' stage. > > Yes, thanks for the response. > > But also, is there a patch which provides an unsigned 32 bit memory address > space for each process? (as opposed to a signed 32 bit address, which I'm > finding in all the 2.2.x kernel updates) > > So the maximum amount of addressable memory would be 4 GB.
I think you must be mistaken; by default Linux supports 3GB of virtual memory and 1GB (- epsilon = 960MB, iirc) of physical RAM. It's possible to change that to 2GB + 2GB, but it isn't possible to get 4GB of linear addressed space on x86. If you need that, get an Alpha.
Even the proposed 36-bit extensions won't allow this -- they merely allow the system to keep around many more anonymous pages which you can't use directly. Fortunately, this is exactly what big databases want.
-- Matthew Wilcox <willy@bofh.ai> "Windows and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture." - N Stephenson
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