Re: memory

Tuukka Toivonen (tuukkat@ees2.oulu.fi)
Fri, 24 Apr 1998 20:12:03 +0300 (EET DST)


On 23 Apr 1998, Frode Vatvedt Fjeld wrote:

>I've been told the architecture [=x86] supports 64GB maximum.

In fact, it's 64 terabytes (1 TB = 1024 GB).
But this requires segmented memory model (16383 segments,
each being 4 GB) and Unix (nor Linux) doesn't use segmentation.

Except that putting segments in a some kind of Unix kernel
(like Linux) would be quite difficult, we would need also to
swap complete 4 GB segments to get the full 4 TB memory
space, which would be too slow for multitasking (IMO).

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