* James Knott (james.knott@rogers.com) [20091029 14:54]:
Philipp Thomas wrote: No I haven't. The 32 bit mode is for running the 32 bit kernels.
No, it's also for running 32 bit *applications*.
64 bit kernels run 64 bits and don't need PAE. PAE was a hack to get around the address limitation of a 32 bit CPU. The amount of memory a 64 bit CPU can handle is more than 4 billion times greater than what a 32 bit CPU can do.
I should have been more precise, sorry. x86-64 *processors* always support PAE, as documented in this abbr. contents of /proc/cpuinfo of an AMD quad core: processor : 3 vendor_id : AuthenticAMD [...] flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca ^^^ cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt pdpe1gb rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow constant_tsc rep_good nonstop_tsc extd_apicid pni monitor cx16 popcnt lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm extapic cr8_legacy abm sse4a misalignsse 3dnowprefetch osvw ibs skinit wdt And this is because it must be able to run PAE kernels. The x86_64 kernel does not need that 36 bit addressing as they support 64 bit addressing (allthough current AMD cpu's only offer 48 bit physical address bits). Philipp -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org