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FreeBSD Looking for People with Lots of RAM

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the not-just-for-ram-drives-anymore dept.

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."

2 of 271 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Volunteer... by Billly+Gates · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Bologna. Its not beta and its considered stable.

    Current != Release. I looked at there ftp site and only found -current or -Release versions. The only one mentioned as stable I found reading the docs are 4.0.

    Current = beta, and Release = stable. Stable= superstable or enterprise class stability.

    FreeBSD 5 is ready for %95 of user and server use. Its just as stable as FreeBSD 4.6 or 4.7 since they are also Release versions. Only 4.0 is considered STABLE at this point.

    However I would not bet my job on it with a server that needs to stay up 24x7 but FreeBSD 5 is as stable if not more out of the box as Redhat8 or Mandrake. FreeBSD hackers obsess about stability more then most linux hackers with the exception of Debian users. I would be cautious of course but to be release quality it needs to be %99.9 stable as opposed to %99.999 stable as 4.0 stable.

    --
    http://saveie6.com/
  2. Re:Why... by smash · · Score: 3, Insightful
    4GB is nothing these days... I've got mates who have a couple of gig in their desktop boxes.

    Hardware support? Never had an issue with it under FreeBSD myself, and if you're planning on running it, you can always pick your hardware properly.

    Now as to WHY you'd run it?

    Its reliable, quick, sensibly laid out, and works very much like commercial unix.

    Just because you're too shortsighted to see a use for it, doesn't mean that no one else has uses for it.

    smash.

    --
    I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.