On Tuesday 24 October 2006 14:51, Randall R Schulz wrote:
On Tuesday 24 October 2006 16:31, Susemail wrote:
...
If you want to use more than about 3GB of that physical RAM, you need a "big" kernel. If you want to exploit more than one CPU / core, you need "smp," so yes, you need a -bigsmp kernel, or you're wasting a great deal of that very high-end machine you've got there.
I have four GB of memory. Yast has always picked the kernel, in this case: :/proc> cat version Linux version 2.6.13-15.12-smp (geeko@buildhost) (gcc version 4.0.2 20050901 (prerelease) (SUSE Linux)) #1 SMP Thu Aug 24 11:23:58 UTC 2006
How much memory is actually available to your kernel?
:~> head -1 /proc/meminfo MemTotal: 4041804 kB :~> uname -a Linux Orion 2.6.13-15.12-smp #1 SMP Thu Aug 24 11:23:58 UTC 2006 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
To wit:
% head -1 /proc/meminfo MemTotal: 4140144 kB
% uname -a Linux smiley 2.6.18-9-bigsmp #1 SMP Mon Oct 2 23:27:41 UTC 2006 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
Vs.:
% head -1 /proc/meminfo MemTotal: 2073084 kB
% uname -a Linux twain 2.6.13-15.11-smp #1 SMP Mon Jul 17 09:43:01 UTC 2006 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
If I were to reboot the first of these two systems (the 4GB one) with the BIOS switched to small memory mode, then it would report only 3 GB available, even though I did not remove any RAM from the mainboard.
should I be using the 'big' kernel?
I believe that if you have more than ~3GB of physical RAM (on an Intel system) you do. And you'll need a CPU and chipset that supports Physical Address Extensions (PAE) to exploit more than 3GB.
Thanks, Jerome
Randall Schulz