[SLL] 32 bit distro that supports 4GB ram with stock kernel

[Jesse Keating]

On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 20:16 -0700, Eric Kahklen wrote:
> Does anyone know if Hardy Heron supports 4GB of ram with the stock 
> kernel?  I am getting ready to do a clean install on my Thinkpad and 
> want to capture my full 4GB of ram.  If not, do any of the other distros 
> support 4GB of ram with their stock kernel?

Just about any 32bit kernel is going to support up /to/ 4 gigs of ram,
although you lose some to PCI address spacing.  It's when you go over 4
gigs that you start needing something special on 32bit, and that
"special" comes in the form of Physical Address Extension, the hack on
32bit platforms to address things greater than 4 gigs.  How far depends
further on more kernel config, as there is another limit at around
16gigs where you need what many distros call 'hugemem' to get past 16
and up to 32/64 I think (which really, a 32bit platform with that much
memory is just silly, go 64bit if you're going to need to address that
much ram as you'll likely need to address more at any single time than a
32bit process can no matter what the kernel config).

-- 
Jesse Keating RHCE      (jkeating.livejournal.com)
Fedora Project          (fedoraproject.org/wiki/JesseKeating)
GPG Public Key          (geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub)
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