Four giga... er, gibibytes!
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| gus3 Jul 26, 2008 5:06 PM EDT |
I just added 2GiB to my system, and now I have the maximum amount of memory addressable by an 80386 CPU. Ha ha, the actual CPU in my desktop system is an AMD64 X2. Oh well, better late than never. I paid US$70 for the expansion. I remember when gigs of RAM cost kilos of $$$. It must be that impending mid-life crisis. |
| techiem2 Jul 26, 2008 6:33 PM EDT |
hehe. I'm still running 2GB in my desktop and laptop. |
| hkwint Aug 13, 2008 1:41 PM EDT |
Hmm, I don't understand it. I thuoght the maximum for a 32bit OS was 3GB? |
| Sander_Marechal Aug 13, 2008 4:06 PM EDT |
@hans: No, it's 4. But usually the OS/BIOS/Video/PCI steal a bit from it. They reserve the high end of the memory address space for those devices. Not a problem if you have less than 4 BG. You'll never notice. But if you have 4 Gig on a 32-bit system then those reserved addresses overlap with the addresses that you want to use to access RAM. BIOS and hardware trump OS so the OS is denied use of those addresses and can't access the last bit of your memory. Note that the system isn't actually using the RAM. It's only using the addresses that you would use to access that RAM and reuses those addresses to access your hardware instead. The amount of "missing" RAM depends on how many addresses you need to access your hardware. |
| gus3 Aug 13, 2008 8:25 PM EDT |
It's a 64-bit system. AMD64 X2. I doubt I could access LXer.com on an old 80386. I was just referring to that as a point of comparison. |
| Sander_Marechal Aug 13, 2008 10:22 PM EDT |
Quoting:It's a 64-bit system. AMD64 X2. But do you run a 64bit distro? If not, then then your hardware is still getting mapped to the high-end of the 32bit address space, masking out some memory. If your system would not do that, your OS would not be able to access the hardware because the addresses would be too large :-) |
| gus3 Aug 13, 2008 10:26 PM EDT |
Definitely: SLAMD64. http://slamd64.com/ But even if I didn't, and stuck with 32-bit, I'd re-compile the kernel to suit. Heck, I do that anyway. ;-) |
| Sander_Marechal Aug 13, 2008 10:36 PM EDT |
In that case you should be able to use all 4BiG of your memory :-) |
| Bob_Robertson Aug 14, 2008 4:49 AM EDT |
My main squeeze here has 512MB of Ram, and I don't feel hemmed in at all. I do notice things get swapped sometimes, like when I do a full apt-get upgrade, but in normal use no problem. $ free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 514260 465792 48468 0 36820 165924 -/+ buffers/cache: 263048 251212 Swap: 1510068 13564 1496504 |
| tracyanne Aug 14, 2008 5:04 PM EDT |
I'm using 3 Gig of RAM, I have 1 Gig assigned to the VM, which is running Mandriva Linux 2009.0 Beta 1 at the moment, and running an update, plus running 2 versions of Firefox (2.x and 3.x) several instances of Konqueror, a development environment, Kaffeine and the usual back ground processes, according to sysinfo I have the following Total memory (RAM): 3.0 GB Free memory: 362.7 MB (+ 823.0 MB Caches) Free swap: 3.5 GB All my swap is free. |
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