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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."

3 of 271 comments (clear)

  1. Oh baby by Evil+Adrian · · Score: 0, Troll

    I've got lots of RAM in my HARD DRIVE, baby! Oh yeah! ...OK, it's out of my system. :-)

    --
    evil adrian
  2. Re:I have just the box for this... by realdpk · · Score: 0, Troll

    Call me ignorant, because I am, but I thought Intel's HT was basically emulating dual CPUs, and it was transparent to the OS. Why would the OS need special support for it?

  3. Why... by jschmerge · · Score: 0, Troll

    would anyone want to waste an expensive machine on FreeBSD?

    Seriously, this isn't trying to be flamebait... I think FreeBSD is a great OS, but it has been lagging behind in the hardware support department. If you buy a machine that can support more than 4Gb of ram, chances are the following statements are true:

    • You can afford such a machine because it is going into a datacenter,
    • Your employer is paying the bill.
    • The vendor that you bought the machine from will only provide support if you are running windows or linux.
    • You don't have the time or desire to troubleshoot stupid hardware or driver problems.

    FreeBSD has lost the battle... I'm not saying that it's dead, but noone in their right mind would run it on entireprise-class hardware.