Re: 12GB RAM with DfBSD?

[Hiten Pandya <hmp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Matthew Dillon wrote:
> :I believe that work on making the code support 64-bit has been done and
> :more is under way, however all parts are not done yet.
> :
> :--
> :Erik Wikström
>
>     No, it hasn't even been started yet.   I do want to do it, It's 
>     definitely the future, but at the moment there are no other developers
>     with it at the top of their list and I have my hands full with journaling
>     and SMP work.

In addition, we have wanted to stabilize as much of the core kernel code 
as possible before starting to port to another architecture.  The people 
who work on the FreeBSD/amd64 port have achieved great progress and I am 
sure it will help us a lot, time wise to learn from their problems.

As far as PAE is concerned, we are not planning to introduce it unless 
there is high demand.  The problem here is that first, it's a hack, and 
secondly you also require the necessary machinery in the device drivers to 
properly work at that level.  So if I was to say that we will port PAE 
just for kicks that we support >4G of memory would not be wise. :-)

Once Matt and I, and Joerg have gone through the kernel cleaning it up and 
 making sure that it's 64-bit clean, supporting large amounts of memory 
on AMD64 would not be hard.

As a side note, I used to have patch floating around somewhere that added 
PAE support to DragonFly, ported from FreeBSD 4 and 5.

				Hiten Pandya
				hmp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx