From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Sep 4 08:33:23 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id IAA05736 for freebsd-questions-outgoing; Fri, 4 Sep 1998 08:33:23 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from cannon.ma.ikos.com ([137.103.105.19]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id IAA05727 for ; Fri, 4 Sep 1998 08:33:05 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from tich@ma.ikos.com) Received: from jefferson.ma.ikos.com (jefferson.ma.ikos.com [137.103.105.64]) by cannon.ma.ikos.com (8.9.1/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA05557 for ; Fri, 4 Sep 1998 11:32:19 -0400 (EDT) Received: from ma.ikos.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by jefferson.ma.ikos.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA02932 for ; Fri, 4 Sep 1998 11:32:18 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <35F00802.E5517972@ma.ikos.com> Date: Fri, 04 Sep 1998 11:32:18 -0400 From: Richard Cownie Organization: Ikos Systems X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.05 [en] (X11; I; SunOS 5.5.1 sun4u) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Support for big memory and SMP Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hi, I have a cpu/memory intensive application which requires >2GB of physical DRAM, and >2GB of virtual address space in a single user process. Machines with 4GB DRAM are now available at reasonable cost (e.g. Dell PowerEdge 6300 ~= $25K). So I have several questions: a) Is there any theoretical reason (e.g. hard split of virtual address space) why FreeBSD couldn't handle 4GB of physical DRAM; or >2GB in a single user process ? b) Has anyone tried this in practice ? c) Is anyone running FreeBSD on Pentium Xeon machines ? In particular, 4-way SMP Xeon machines. d) I've heard a rumour that Linux has a hard 2GB limit - does anyone have details of this ? e) The third alternative is Solaris on x86 - if anyone knows about big-memory issues with this environment I'd be very interested. Thanks Richard Cownie email: tich@ma.ikos.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message