>32GB memory with Xeon ?

[Thomas Hurst]

* Hiroharu Tamaru (tamaru at myn.rcast.u-tokyo.ac.jp) wrote:

> Specifically, I am thinking of a Dual-core x Dual-processor Xeon 5160,
> with 5000P chipset and something like 40GB of RAM.
>
> I'd appreciate if someone would tell me if the system can use the
> whole memory, and/or if one single process can use the whole memory
> (or at least most of it)?

Should be fine, though I've only personally used systems with 16G, I've
had individual processes approach 30GB using swap (though not on
purpose, *cough*).

> Are there any other things to be noted? like.. some popular hardware
> not working with > 4GB memory and such.  I don't need much fancy
> hardware, but would like to expect SATA disks, ATAPI CDs and Gb
> Ethernet NICs to work..

ata(4) has a poor history on systems with >=4G and more than one or two
disks, though I've not tried it recently; it always used to run out of
bounce pages and die, and I've not seen anything to suggest it's been
resolved.  I bought an LSI MegaRAID (amr(4)) for the bulk of my storage.

  http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-amd64/2006-March/007827.html

No problems with if_bge/em, USB, etc.  Here's a more useful list of
drivers:

  http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-amd64/2006-March/007758.html

-- 
Thomas 'Freaky' Hurst
    http://hur.st/