Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2002 02:07:42 +0200 From: Erik Trulsson <ertr1013@student.uu.se> To: "Kevin A. Pieckiel" <kpieckiel@smartrafficenter.org> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Dell server with 6 GB RAM Message-ID: <20021023000742.GA67482@falcon.midgard.homeip.net> In-Reply-To: <20021022233951.GA84639@pacer.dmz.smartrafficenter.org> References: <20021022233951.GA84639@pacer.dmz.smartrafficenter.org>
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On Tue, Oct 22, 2002 at 07:39:51PM -0400, Kevin A. Pieckiel wrote: > I'm looking at buying a Dell PowerEdge 2650. These servers can come with > up to 6 GB RAM according to Dell's web site. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, > but what good does that much RAM do when I only have a 32-bit address space? > What am I missing here? How can the hardware or the OS support more than > 4 GB RAM? The latest x86 CPUs (from the Pentium-II onwards) has the capability to physically address a 36-bit address space. This is done by using some extensions to the MMU to map virtual memory to physical in a special way and requires OS support to work. A single process still cannot address more than 4GB at once, but you could have one process using 3GB and another process the other 3GB. Now, the natural question is of course: "Does FreeBSD support more than 4GB RAM?" The answer is no, it does not and there are currently no plans that I know of to add such support in the near future either. -- <Insert your favourite quote here.> Erik Trulsson ertr1013@student.uu.se To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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