Re: Debian Lenny 32
On Thu, 29 Dec 2011 21:32:06 -0600, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
> On 12/29/2011 10:53 AM, Camaleón wrote:
>> On Thu, 29 Dec 2011 18:26:28 +0200, Mohamed Daif wrote:
>>
>>> What is the maximum RAM supported in Debian Lenny 32bit .
>>
>> It should be 64 GiB with a PAE enabled kernel (bigmem).
>
> 64GB max for the kernel, but userspace processes are still limited to a
> 4GB virtual address space. Thus if one has an application, say a
> database or medical imaging app (think MRI), that requires direct access
> to say, 32GB of RAM, one should be using an x86-64 kernel and an
> application compiled for an x86-64 target.
That's a self-imposed limitation.
It could be by-passed by using "memory mapping" techniques (this is
documented in the wikipedia page you pointed out about PAE, which
specifically mentions "mmap()") but not many linux applications are
making use of it, I'm afraid, contrary what happens on Windows systems.
In the end, applications that need to handle/move big quantities of data
directly from the RAM will benefit of a pure 64-bits OS.
Greetings,
--
Camaleón
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