Maybe I didn't search hard enough, but I can't seem to find anywhere the maximum amount of ram the latest Fedora will recognise..

Does anyone know?

I'm prepared to believe my _64 Fedora would cope with a ridiculously large number.
Why do you ask ?.

I have an old server that supports up to 16gb ram.

I'd like to know if a 32bit version of Fedora could handle the full amount of ram...

If you can you would be better off using the 64bit version. If you cannot, you can use the PAE kernel but there will be a performance hit using PAE. How much of a hit will depend on what you are running.

For servers I would strongly recommend NOT using Fedora. Fedora only has a 13 month support life. After that there are no updates of any kind. Consider using Centos5.2. Centos is RHEL with the logos stripped out. It is binary compatible with RHEL. Centos is free to download and update. The 32bit memory limitation will apply to Centos as well (actually to any 32bit OS).

I would only install RHEL/CentOS if you want to have fairly old versions of software and kernels installed.

I would rather have slightly old yet stable software than to have to upgrade my entire OS every 13 months or so.


Especially in in a server environment.

Another thing is that Fedora has got some updates every couple of days, and although updates are usually a very positive and desirable thing, the more updates you have, the more chances to break something

Depends on the situation.
If this is just an old server you have "inherited" that you can play on, stick a PAE kernel on and it will use all the memory. Boxes like that are great for learning what will and what won't work.

the box has an old SKA4 board in it with 4 Pentium 3 900mHz cpus. So i don't think it could support a 64bit OS..

Fedora was the first linux i tried out so i'm kinda hooked on it, but thanks for the tip about using centos - i'll look into it if I end up using it for real server activities. For now, i still need to get used to using linux

(im sure there are easier ones to learn with, but i like the look and feel of Fedora...)

Just so you know RHEL/Centos is based on Fedora or to say it the other way around Fedora is the development version of RHEL. RHEL5.X was based on FC6 and RHEL6.X is targeted at being based on F10 (might be pushed back to F11). So Fedora and RHEL/Centos have pretty much the same feel.

kromberg

A couple of things to consider about that is this. While RHEL's kernel number may be old, they patch in the newer (proven) patches making the RHEL kernels roughly only a couple of months behind Fedora. The old rule that RHEL would not upgrade a software version by a major revision would appear to be changing. RHEL 5.0 was released with FF1.5 but by 5.2 it had been upgraded to FF3.X. This is just the most glaring example I could think of off the top of my head, but there are others. Fedora 8 on the other hand was released with FF2.0 and still runs (from standard repos) FF2.X.

FWIW i find FF3 dodgy and inconvenient. rather stick with FF2

Well i filled it up with 16gb of RAM.

any suggestions on how to fully take advantage of the 4 cpus and all the ram? (or any suggestions on where i could look to find the info?)

As I said in post #4, you will need to use a PAE kernel(it is in the standard repo) to see all the ram. The cpus should be fully accessible on any modern Fedora kernel.

Thanks for that.

yep all cpus were good in fedora core 6 is there anything to help with load balancing, so programs aren't run on just a single cpu? (so one program can be spread across multiple cpus)