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Date:      Thu, 21 Feb 2002 16:41:30 +0100
From:      "Alex (DDS)" <akruijff@dds.nl>
To:        =?ISO-8859-1?Q?S=F8ren?= Neigaard <neigaard@e-box.dk>
Cc:        Erik Trulsson <ertr1013@student.uu.se>, Alex <FreeBSD@cybertron.tmfweb.nl>, questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: OT: Re: Max RAM supported by Hardware
Message-ID:  <3C75152A.7040705@dds.nl>
References:  <1556477954.20020220210026@e-box.dk> <14217053982.20020220215646@cybertron.tmfweb.nl> <15518324328.20020220221756@cybertron.tmfweb.nl> <20020220220028.GA21515@student.uu.se> <193651536.20020221082100@e-box.dk>

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Søren Neigaard wrote:

>Wednesday, February 20, 2002, 11:00:28 PM, Erik wrote:
>
>ET> On Wed, Feb 20, 2002 at 10:17:56PM +0100, Alex wrote:
>ET> Sorry, but you just don't seem to understand how things work.
>ET> With a 32-bit address space the maximum amount of memory that can be
>ET> addressed is 2^32 = 4Gigabytes. This is also the max that FreeBSD
>ET> supports on i386.
>
>Great - So I did understand it right then :)
>
>
>ET> There should be no need to recompile anything.
>ET> (Although there has been some reports of problems with >2G but I think
>ET> that has been fixed now.)
>
>That sounds super, I love FreeBSD, it's so much easier than any other
>OS I have tried :)
>
Yes, i made a small error, here. I find that it was a bit to harsh of 
Erik to say i know nothing about the subject. I mainly tried to explain 
way it was posible for 64G support given a 32 bits adress bus. I didn't 
go in to the design choiches of any processor.

>
>
>
>ET> Modern x86 CPUs (Pentium Pro and later) can address up to 2^36 (=64G)
>ET> bytes of memory.  To use the extra memory requires you to play some
>ET> tricks with the MMU (Memory Management Unit) to map the memory into the
>ET> 4G address space. Even then you cannot really have a single process use
>ET> more than 4G.  This capability is currently not supported by FreeBSD
>ET> and to support it would require some fairly serious rewriting of parts
>ET> of the kernel.
>
This i wrote in other words and holds the key way in some casus a system 
can handle more memory then 2^n (n = number of bits on the adress bus). 
Wether or not a pocess can handle more than 4G (in this case) depends on 
the OS (or at least the design of hardware).

>
>
>ET> On Alpha the max that is supported is 2G. I am not sure why that
>ET> limitation exists but it does.
>
>Strange - It should be able to support much much more. I guess FreeBSD
>is mostly for i386, right? Not much being done for other platforms?
>
The Alpha processor proberbly just doesn't support it. Thus doesn't have 
the base and offset regestries and memory thats able to handle it.



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