Hi All,

I just completed an 8.3 build, i386, intended as a LAMP server, no GUI. All the essential software is working as expected. I have some questions including one about PAE.

It looks like I currently have a non-PAE kernel. 'Top' reports 2.9gb of RAM available on an 8gb RAM laptop (Asus G73JW-XT1). Reading this 2008 thread, it appears the kernel config option controls whether the kernel is PAE. Is this correct? In my kernel config file, is active and is not active.

Are these the only two config settings that control whether the kernel is PAE? What about (which is active in my config file).

TIA

The way I would find out is to grep the .config file for PAE, thusly Find the section it's in, probably "Processor type & Features" go in as if you're making the kernel again, except press the help, and read it. Then you become the authority. I would go with what the help says. CONFIG_HIGHMEM might just be a setting that asks the other questions and skips them otherwise if it's not necessary. I would not trust6 a 2008 thread as the last word - it's too old. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since.

Thinking logically, there's probably sizes: Sure, you want more than 4G; like most of us, you want a few extra address lines, which each double that(8G, 16G, 32G, 64G); but there's guys out there running VMs by the bucketload, with serious ram (256G - 1TB), and you don't need to assign resources for that sort of access to have your 8G. So I imaging the '64G' imitates 64G with 4 virtual address lines, and the HIGHMEM setting might be for servers with more than 64G, which will use a different approach.

1 members found this post helpful.

Ok thanks business_kid,

It is basically what I figured.

My only comment is that an i386 kernel with PAE can only address a maximum of 64GB of address space (according to this Wikipedia page)

If you need over 64G of memory, and you're using a '386, aren't we going a little soft in the head here? I don't know of any '386 motherboard that would hold 64G.