Re: Large memory system

[Rik van Riel <riel@nl.linux.org>]

On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, Daniel Blakeley wrote:

> 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?

Just today there was a patch on linux-kernel with a
patch that allows you to use the top 2 GB as a RAM
disk or something like that.

You can use that for swap and to mmap() stuff on.
I think this could be quite useful for large simulations
and stuff like that.

36-bit addressing is a bit difficult at the moment, but
undoubtedly someone will code up something like that for
Linux 2.3 (maybe the prof could let some (under)graduate
student do this as a major project?).

succes,

Rik -- If a Microsoft product fails, who do you sue?
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