Question regarding RAM

[Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com>]

Andrew Sackville-West put forth on 10/30/2009 12:19 AM:

> unless you're running a lot of memory on x86 architecture. then you
> might need the bigmem kernel to see it all properly. But other than
> that, it should just work. 

Or, a bit less ambiguous:

If you are currently using a standard 32 bit x86 kernel on a machine
with less than 4GB RAM, and if you plan on installing more than 4GB of
RAM, _then_ you'll need the "bigmem" 32 bit x86 kernel, which uses PAE
to support more than 4GB.

If, however, you are running Debian on just about any other
architecture, to include MIPS, Alpha, HPPA, IA64 (Itanium), or SPARC,
you shouldn't need to change anything with Debian, as these are all 64
bit architectures and thus the kernels on these support up to 64 or
256GB of RAM, depending on the system hardware.  On some of these
machines, however, you might need to make changes in the system (BIOS)
setup telling the machine how much RAM is installed.  Depends on the age
of the machine mostly.  Older ones may need to be told, newer ones
auto-detect.

--
Stan