I'm very sorry, I don't want to offend you, but the suggestion is quite useless. There aren't a lot of 32 bit systems with RAM above 5-6 GB, and even if there are, it's insane.
There are a lot more old systems and enabling this option will hurt them a lot, since the HIGHMEM64 will make the RAM paging information bigger.

I just wish sometime he'd say what he really thinks rather than all this beating around the bush ...

Hi,


'Linus' stated it very clearly. Your either 'lazy', 'crazy' or as I feel selfish when you expect things of this sort to be done for you. When you clearly have the computing power to setup as your needs warrant. While others around the world can't nor may not have the means to change without major problems or effort. There are more 386 class machines than the newest multi-core system. Most people in the world don't have the means to upgrade monthly or even yearly so don't expect things to change to just suit your desires.

BTW, the date on the post has nothing to do with a valid point of view.

My

1 members found this post helpful.

Now, as Linus says:

"It's ok for extending to 2-4GB (ie HIGHMEM4G, not 64G)"

Maybe, that would be a good compromise, then. Personally I don't care, actually, as my 32-bit systems have no more than 2 GB of RAM, while my bigger machines are all 64-bit.

But if I understand Linus correctly, he's referring to 32-bit CPUs, and not to 32-bit operating systems on 64-bit CPUs, which is, what many people have. Quite a few people run 32-bit Slackware on 64-bit hardware. Not sure, if HIGHMEM64G is a problem on these machines, too.

I had Slackware 12.2 on my most capable machine with 8 GB of RAM, before Slackware64 was available, myself. Although it was ok, I switched to Slackware64 as soon as it was there. But there are few applications that really run faster. Image processing for my photos, is one example. Many other things run with no noticeable performance difference.

So maybe, the problem isn't as big, if you look at it as an end-user, and as Linus says, you won't see it in user space.

What's my point, then? I think, it's ok both ways, and the decision should be based on user base. How many users of 32-bit Slackware are there, and do they use it on 32 or 64-bit hardware?

EDIT: And I am pretty sure, that it is either actually already based on this and technical reasons, or that that the defaults are just what the vanilla kernel comes with. Which, in turn, is usually made with the above considerations in mind.
And while Linus doesn't care about 'insane' users, he, and also Pat and 'the crew' listen to their 'sane' users. This is, at least, my personal experience.

Evidence: Slackware is the best platform on Earth for Java development. There's no other distro that makes it less complicated to install and use the latest Java SDK. This is, because users wanted to have Java included with Slackware, although Pat was thinking about dropping it in order to save space on the DVD.

So I'm sure, he's reading this thread and draw the right conclusions, as always.

gargamel

If you care about performance and kernel size you should always compile your own kernel, imho.

Why is it embarassing to recompile a kernel? I could almost, kinda understand ridiculous, but I don't follow embarassing at all.

Also, I have a new found respect for Linus. I rather enjoyed:HA!

wow, seeing that is enough to convince me to not use the high mem features on my 32bit server with 6gigs of ram.... I bought it used for cheap. As an after thought, a new bargain 64bit machine for the same price would probably out perform this machine even though it is a dual dual-core xeon machine with 6 gigs. Additionally, I think there is some weird bios feature to make the OS use half the ram and do some kind of redundancy thing in the bios.

I still use PAE 64 for my lfs system that I'm working on and the slack13 32bit that I used as a host system for the LFSbuild. I've suffered no ill effects to date. Of course neither of those have been used to do more than cp/mv/tar a bunch of files and build a bunch of packages. It has 6GB RAM.

There may be a performance penalty, but it probably depends on your use cases, how big it is. If I was in your shoes I'd give HIGHMEM64G a try. If you have applications that benefit from the bigger RAM, that is. In case you are not satisfied, reverting back to the default would be simply a matter of re-installing the pre-compiled binary kernel that comes with Slackware, and run lilo.

gargamel

I always have at least 3 entries on my boot menu
Recompiled With my Options
Generic Slackware with initrd
and "Safe" with HUGE

I don't want to have to use a boot disk if I screw up a kernel change and it's always nice to have a boot option for the 'expected' stable slackware configuration. This is why people should use the 'tag' option in their kernel configuration. No Kludging of your system packages.

Anyway, my post was more of a comment on Linus' comments. The server is off most the time and more of a toy to serve a scsi dvd library robot. autofs+network shares+remote access if I get around to writing the scripts. However, considering in the long run it may end up doing transcoding or streaming a movie dvd through vlc, the memory will be heavily used at that point.

Non-PAE kernels really have problem(s) besides the 4GB problem -- e.g.
Does any PAE-hater know why some people would run 32-bit systems on 64-bit bigmem machines? The reason is simple:

1. It is not easy to buy old computers nowadays. If a computer dies, one is very likely to buy a 64-bit bigmem one for replacement.
2. Althought the computer is changed, the maintainer still wishes to run his/her old production software collection. This is common sense for avoiding suddenly introducing many problems into a running system.
3. Using multilib system introduces unnecessary complexity, which tends to introduce more bugs into a running system.

Of course these reasons are nonsense to a *pure* desktop newbie. But I wonder how many Slackware users use Slackware *only* for personal desktop computing.

For those who really need to run Slackware on Pentium and older systems, please recompile your SMP kernel with BIGMEM64G disabled.
I can be pretty sure that these are advanced users. They must have faster computers. They can save time by compiling non-PAE SMP kernels on a computer other than their pre-Pentium system.

Do you folks think Linus' comments indicate there is little reason to have more than 2gb ram or that HIGHMEM implementation in the kernel make it not worthwhile for a 32 bit processor?

I currently have no PCs with more than 2gb but was thinking the next system would have at least 4.

Hi,

It really depends on your needs. If development then you may need more power thus a lot of processor load along with more memory.

If all you are doing is minor editing, browsing and such then your needs may not be that great.