Thus I'm concluding if it doesn't work then it might be a BIOS issue.
Once again: - The Bios has to reserve address space for PCI devices and usually reserves between 0.5 and 1 GiB. - To make the physical RAM that's hidden by that reservation available, most BIOSs map this RAM beyond the 4 GiB (2^32) Threshold. - To address that memory, you need a kernel supporting either PAE or long (i.e. 64 bit) mode. If the memory isn't available, it's rather obvious that it is the BIOS that failed to do the mapping.
In PAE the operating system uses page tables to map this 4 GiB address space onto the 64 GiB of total memory, and the map is usually different for each process.
You've got something mixed up there. Not the OS but the processor uses page tables and it does that for *all* operating modes, not only PAE, as virtual memory management on x86 and x86-64 relies on page tables. Philipp -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org