[CentOS] CENTOS 5 (X86 32 bits) only support 16 Gb RAM???

Wed Nov 17 21:26:30 UTC 2010
Ross Walker <rswwalker at gmail.com>

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 4:15 PM, Pasi Kärkkäinen <pasik at iki.fi> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 04:14:01PM -0600, Barry Brimer wrote:
>> Quoting James Bensley <jwbensley at gmail.com>:
>>
>> > Eh? How can you have 16GBs on a 32bit kernel?
>>
>> You can have up to 64GB using PAE
>> <https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension>.
>>
>
> Yeah, but in reality you can't run 64GB 32bit PAE kernel.
> All the lowmem would be used for page structs, and the system wouldn't be usable.
>
> 16GB PAE 32bit system still has some lowmem available..

I think CentOS 4 had a PAE kernel called hugemem that had a 2048/2048 address
space that allowed for up to 64GB. That was done away with in 5 I
believe in favor
of going 64-bit if you have more then 16GB, even if you plan on using
32-bit apps.

-Ross