http://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=586916
http://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=586916#c8
--- Comment #8 from Jeff Mahoney 2010-03-10 19:49:42 UTC ---
BTW, the reason the rest of your memory is mapped above 4 GB is because devices
operate by using memory-mapped i/o. They map themselves into the same physical
memory address space as memory except that they can't handle addresses above
the 4 GB mark.
So when your entire address space is limited to 32-bit as it is in the default
kernel, the memory above the 32-bit address space is unavailable.
The PAE kernel uses an extension in the processor to enable a 36-bit address
space for memory only. Devices still use the 32-bit address space.
We offer both kernel versions because some processors don't support the
extension and the kernel will fail to boot otherwise. It's theoretically
possible to have a hybrid kernel that can fall back to non-PAE behavior when
the processor lacks support for it, but it hasn't been implemented. It's a lot
of effort to only support processors that aren't manufactured anymore.
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