4G/4G kernel patch dropped

Felipe Alfaro Solana felipe_alfaro at linuxmail.org
Tue Jan 4 12:36:57 UTC 2005


On 4 Jan 2005, at 13:11, Kenneth Porter wrote:

> I just saw the announcement of a new Fedora kernel with this change 
> note:
>
>> A large change over previous kernels has been made. The 4G:4G memory
>> split patch has been dropped, and Fedora kernels now revert back to
>> the upstream 3G:1G kernel/userspace split.
>
> A bit of googling indicates that the 4G:4G patch is needed for systems 
> with a lot of RAM (eg. 32 GB or more) because the kernel memory tables 
> scale with the size of physical memory and a 32 GB system uses 0.5 GB 
> for the table, half the kernel space available to a 3G:1G system. A 64 
> GB system won't boot because all of kernel memory is needed for the 
> table.
>
> <http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0307.1/0246.html>
>
> Was this reversion done for performance or for some other reason? I'd 
> guess most consumer systems won't need 4G:4G as they won't have 
> anything like that much memory, and it only makes sense for an 
> enterprise class server.

Maybe the 4-level Pagetable changes Andrea Arcangeli introduced into 
2.6.10 are related?




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