johnsfine;

Thanks for your reply. The threads answers to the original question are clear and make sense to me. The 3 GB per process is a new one for me and explains a lot.

BTW; the system has a hard drive which is intended for music and video storage.

I am not ready to accept your suggestion that swap from a SSD is bad practice. I need a better understanding of swap and the trade offs involved. Intel appears to use a 20 GB SSD as a giant swap drive in their Z68 chipset for the 1155 socket. However, this is clearly off subject, so I will retire from here with a thank you.

T L
On The West Coast.

Yes, in a way. I have a Dell Latitude 3340 Laptop with 4-core CPU and 8 GB RAM. I use Slackware 14.2 (32-bit) on it. In order to use more than 4 GB RAM, I proceeded as follows. For example, I use H2O Machine Learning packages, briefly as follows:
1. Install Oracle VirtualBox
2. Create a Virtual Machine on it, from Slackware 14.2 DVD, as described by Stephen Glasskeys, "VirtualBox: How to create a Linux Virtual Machine". I used the following main settings:
(a) 4 cores (CPU)
(b) 3.85 GB RAM
(c) "Guest Attachments" installed
(d) setting up Network access
3. Installed H2O (exactly same version as on the main machine) on the Virtual Linux machine.
4. Set up H2O on both machines so as to form a two machine "cluster". Note that though machine cycles will be
shared between the two machines, the RAM use is exclusive.

5. Running a large enough a ML problem on this cluster showed that I was able to use almost all of the 8 GB RAM, and that too usefully. The speed penalty was not noticeable.

Generally speaking, if you have a (modern ...) 64-bit capable CPU, then you should be running a 64-bit capable OS.

Although a 64-bit processor can put itself into a "32-bit compatibility mode," in order to correctly support software that imagines that "a computer will never have more than 4GB of RAM," this is very-obviously a hobbled-horse scenario. You should relieve yourself of it as quickly as possible, and let your CPU run free.

The answer to your specific question is "yes": a 32 bit OS will be able to use between 3.2 and 4 GB of physical RAM plus any amount of swap space you wish to allocate (within the limit of disk or file size your 32 bit OS supports). The swap partition or file is used by the memory manager to "page out" blocks of memory not required by the system at any given time, enabling it to get around its incapacity to directly address more than 2E32 (4GB) of physical memory. The total of both physical RAM plus swap space is often called "virtual memory", and this can be greater in size than the amount of physical RAM directly addressable by the 32 bit system.

Cheers.

1 members found this post helpful.

The 4GB limit is architectural: 2^32 = 4,294,967,296. The processor's address bus is 32 bits wide.

It is quite likely that your system's CPU is actually capable of operating in 64-bit mode, and if so, you should do this. Linux is capable of running 32-bit software, but there is no logical reason to put the operating system in handcuffs.

And why was this thread dredged up for no good reason ?.

This horse was beaten to death long ago.

Dunno ... sometimes the same technical topics keep coming back. Yes, there are still a lot of 32-bit OS's that are still deployed out there.

"A newbie in India" picked up on this thread because it – apparently – really did match his concerns ... last week. "So it goes," sometimes.