FreeBSD Looking for People with Lots of RAM

drdink writes "A few weeks ago, PAE (Physical Address Extension) support was added to FreeBSD 5-CURRENT. This allows memory above 4GB to be used normally by the kernel and userland on the x86 platform. Jake Burkholder, the man behind PAE, is now looking for users to help him test this new feature. In his message to the freebsd-current mailing list, Jake describes the current caveats to PAE and also says 'We'd like this feature to be solid for 5.1-RELEASE, so I'm hoping there are people out there with systems with more than 4G of ram that are willing to test it.' This, along with other features make FreeBSD 5-STABLE look very promising."

Comments

Re:Volunteer...

[UniverseIsADoughnut]

Freebsd does SMP quit well. They have/are redoing the whole SMP system. It was slated for 5.0 but i don't know if it did or did not make it in. When finished Freebsd will have and extremely good SMP, if not the best.

So what are you crunching with that thing?

Re:Volunteer...

[drdink]

FreeBSD/i386 5.0-RELEASE Release Notes: Processor/Motherboard Support:

SMP support has been largely reworked, incorporating code from BSD/OS 5.0. One of the main features of SMPng (``SMP Next Generation'') is to allow more processes to run in kernel, without the need for spin locks that can dramatically reduce the efficiency of multiple processors. Interrupt handlers now have contexts associated with them that allow them to be blocked, which reduces the need to lock out interrupts.

Yes. This is in 5.0 now.