8GB RAM: PAE or not PAE?

[Michael Vince]

err wrote:
> Hi
>
> I have an HP DL380 quad core with 8GB of RAM and SAS disks in RAID, with freebsd 6 STABLE on it. 
>
> Everything works fine, except for the RAM addressing problem: freebsd sees only 4GB.
> I know it have been discussed, but it could be a problem to me for running a 64bit compiled system; what is the stability of a kernel compiled with the PAE option?
>
> I've a kernel with no modules, and before trying PAE I would know for other people experiences...
> In particular I'm interested in the behavior of ciss, bce, em and usb stuff, and application like Perl, Ruby, PHP 5, MySQL server, heavy MAWK and bzip2 load.
>
> Also, if I boot a PAE kernel, in order to have all my RAM available, I have to set the hw.physmem variable to 8G ?
>
> Thanks
> --
> Emmanuel Richiardone
>   
I have 2 PAE servers under my control and they work fine one is a Dell 
2850, PAE is a little be extra work compared to most FreeBSD setups 
though but if its working on the hardware you need you should be home.

The only reason I used PAE over a AMD64 kernel is because I needed to 
run stuff that wasn't available on 64 bit, such as Oracle drivers for 
Perl scripts etc. If I didn't have these needs I would prefer to run AMD64.

Mike