"Eicke" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Hi Gary I appreciate your response. > My machine is a Dual Xeon 2.8 GHz 64-bit.
What does this mean? I thought "Xeon" was Intel's brand name for "server-grade Pentium", which still implies a 32-bit ISA and a 36-bit physical memory address. Maybe you mean that there's a 64-bit physical memory address? This would make it possible for the kernel to see up to 2^64 bytes of RAM, but applications internally still only have the 32-bit addresses. > From: "Gary Hennigan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >> In general you're not going to be able to allocate more than 2GB of >> RAM on a 32-bit system like the Pentium. While Intel played some >> tricks with the hardware and actually implemented a 36-bit address bus >> (I think it's 36 bits anyway), applications generally use 32-bit >> pointers on a 32-bit CPU and they're assumed to be signed so that >> limits you to 2^31 bytes of memory, or 2048MB (2GB). I think the actual limitation here is the way the kernel partitions the application address space; some memory needs to be reserved for the program code, shared libraries, to interface to the kernel, and so on. This would bring about the 3 GB limit the OP is seeing. It might be possible to tweak the kernel (as in, modify the kernel source in somewhat non-trivial ways) to get closer to 4 GB, but that 4 GB really is a hard limit that you're not going to get around without a full 64-bit CPU. -- David Maze [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/ "Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal." -- Abra Mitchell -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
