Large memory issues on 4-STABLE

[Peter Jeremy]

On 2003-Sep-15 07:07:26 +0200, Irvine Short <irvine at sanbi.ac.za> wrote:
>However we have a situation where if I set MAXDSIZ to 2048 or above then
>things break, so FreeBSD right now has an effectivce limit of 2GB per
>process.

+/- a GB or so, yes.  This is a side-effect of userland and the kernel
living within the same address space.  It is possible for the kernel
and userland to use different address spaces - most of the PDP-11
Unices did this - but I don't believe it's been done on any of the
32-bit or higher Unices.  Implementing on an i386 would be very messy.

>This is relevant to the work we're doing - some of my users actually
>really do need this amount of memory.

PAE is at best a kludge.  If you really need a large RAM configuration,
I strongly suggest you start saving for a 64-bit system.

Peter