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Date:      Wed, 18 Jul 2001 18:22:29 +0200
From:      Erik Trulsson <ertr1013@student.uu.se>
To:        freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD 4.3 and 6G RAM
Message-ID:  <20010718182229.A86118@student.uu.se>
In-Reply-To: <NFBBIJCJGLAFOKNCJHKHIEIBCGAA.jon@witchspace.com>
References:  <20010718105637.A97286@student.uu.se> <NFBBIJCJGLAFOKNCJHKHIEIBCGAA.jon@witchspace.com>

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On Wed, Jul 18, 2001 at 05:04:45PM +0100, Jonathan Belson wrote:
> Hiya
> 
> > > i have an intel 4400 platform equipped with 4 xeon processors and 6G ram.
> > > the mainboard is based on the ServerWorks ServerSet II HE chipset (by
> > > intel), which supports up to 16G RAM (or 32G, i'm not sure at the moment).
> > > 
> > > i have installed FreeBSD 4.3-STABLE.
> > > 
> > > unfortunately, the system seems unable to work with this amount of ram. 
> > 
> > FreeBSD does not support more than 4G RAM  (at least not on x86, I
> > don't know about Alpha).
> > My suggestion would be to remove the extra 2G RAM from the machine and
> > see if things work better then.  (FreeBSD will not be able to use it
> > anyway so you don't lose anything by removing it.)
> 
> Dumb question: by my calculations, a 32bit address register can only
> address 2**32 bytes of memory, ie. 4GB.  Is it possible for your
> average P3/Athlon to addres more than this?  Does it use banking/
> MMU tricks?
> 

Not a dumb question but yes, and yes.
Modern x86 CPUs can address more than 4 GB of physical RAM.
I think this was introduced with the Pentium Pro but I am not certain.
Yes, it uses MMU tricks to do it.

Note that even though the physical memory may be more than 4 GB the
address space of a single process is still only 32 bits so a single
process still cannot address more than 4 GB of RAM.



-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013@student.uu.se


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