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Date:      Sun, 24 Jun 2001 00:26:00 -0500
From:      Andy Isaacson <adi@hexapodia.org>
To:        cvs-committers@FreeBSD.org, cvs-all@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: src/sys/i386/i386 machdep.c
Message-ID:  <20010624002600.B31710@hexapodia.org>
In-Reply-To: <XFMail.010623224452.jhb@FreeBSD.org>; from jhb@FreeBSD.org on Sat, Jun 23, 2001 at 10:44:52PM -0700
References:  <20010623214226.H67164-100000@scribble.fsn.hu> <XFMail.010623224452.jhb@FreeBSD.org>

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[What is this doing on cvs-all?  Oh well, I wouldn't have seen it if
 it were in the right place.]

On Sat, Jun 23, 2001 at 10:44:52PM -0700, John Baldwin wrote:
> On 23-Jun-01 Attila Nagy wrote:
> > Hello,
> >> > Hmm- can you have more than 4GB of memory on an i386?
> >> Yes, you can have up to 64gb on PPro's or later (at least, the CPU's
> >> support a 36-bit physical address space) but we don't currently
> >> support the extensions so we can't use more than 4 anyways.
> > Do you plan to support this feature in the future (for example in 5.0)?
> 
> It's not easy.
> 
> > I think it's not too easy and not an obvious task, but maybe it's worth
> > the extra work (people using big DBs on x86?)...
> 
> Actually, it doesn't really help as much as it would seem, because the virtual
> address space of each process is still limited to 4gb, so it doesn't let you
> run larger processes, it just lets you fit more of them into memory.

Ah, but assuming all the necessary kernel support, I can arrange my
database as multiple 2GB segments, and access them as mmaped files.
munmap() + mmap() should be pretty efficient, assuming the kernel does
everything right, and the data never needs to hit disk.  (Yes, this is a
horrid hack, and the right solution is to use a 64-bit processor, but
what can you do.)

-andy

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