Dual Opteron -- FC2 won't recognize RAM

[Craig White]

On Fri, 2004-07-23 at 20:36, Ed Hill wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> Today, I installed FC2 on a dual Opteron-140 with 12Gig RAM.  The
> install would only work if I added "mem=1024M" or similar as a kernel
> option.
> 
> After the install (which went nicely), the system would only boot if
> less than 4Gig was specified using the kernel option "mem=3900M" or
> similar.  Anything over 4Gig resulted in an immediate re-boot (reset?)
> within a second or two of the attempted boot.
> 
> This machine has successfully run both SuSE and RHEL v3.  I would now
> like to use FC2 but am disappointed by the (apparent?) lack of support
> for 12Gig RAM.  I've tried searching for information on Fedora large-RAM
> support but am making not headway.  Are there any special kernels or
> options that I could try with FC2 to get it to recognize all of the RAM?
> 
> Or should I just go back to RHEL 3?
----
I don't know about FC-3 but I definitely recall discussions in RHL about
kernel being compiled without the options for big memory (of course,
this applied to the 2.4 kernel and I would suppose kernel compile
options are somewhat different with 2.6 kernel.

you should probably search google.com/linux - kernel.org etc - for
discussions about dual opteron's and large memory.

I have to believe that you would want to compile your own kernel for
this if you intend to use FC-2

I've only used SuSE for a limited amount of time so I can't comment on
them but RHEL 3 automatically gives you smp/large memory support and
thus you wouldn't have to compile a kernel (though you might want to
anyway). They also sell the Professional Workstation which depending
upon the intended use, may be better for your purposes. Then again, if
this is about a production server, the more important it is to keep it
online, the harder you should be looking at the EL stuff.

Craig