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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."
MY dilemma is I have a lot of Ram but half of it is flakey!!! so I just tell linux to skip over it. It's really like having a regular amount of good ram. Hey, can BSD map my bad ram out too? Anyone?
I have an HP LXR 8500 with four processors (currently) and 4GB of ram. I've been considering upgrading to 6GB for a while anyway. I'm currently using Windows 2000 advanced server on it, after being somewhat frustrated with Linux support a couple of years ago. I'd be more than willing to try out BSD, although I never have before. Is there anything I should know about this? I presume that BSD would run Mathematica fine under Linux emulation mode, as my main use of the box is just Mathematica crunching. Does FreeBSD make reasonable use of four processors? Anything else I should beware of? And anyone know a good source for cheap lxr-ready ram?
I've had this sig for three days.
How would you test that? I can't think of any easy way to actually test that much RAM. What would you do, load 8GB of random data into RAM and compare it byte-by-byte with the original data?
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
Umm, that'd be 8 MEGs you got in there, Sparky.
I'll bet it has a 5.25 TB floppy drive, and a 20" LCD green-screen monitor.
From the office of Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf (aka Baghdad Bob):
"BSD isn't dead! The infidel Linux coaliation will soon pay the price for descriating BSD!"
More at 11.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
Jesus... I could even put the swap space ON THE RAMDISK! Think about how fast that'd be!
As others have noted, Windows NT 5.0^H^H^H^H^H^H2000 also supports it.
So the Linux kernel's support was obviously stolen from SCO, and therefore doesn't count.
Talk about a fucking bloated OS!? 4 gigs of RAM? Not even XP Pro requires that much memory!
I guess I need to work on my delivery... :)
FreeBSD supports Hyperthreading in 5.0-CURRENT. There is a sysctl variable called "machdep.hlt_cpus". You can use this variable to control which logical CPUs should be taken out of the idle loop and used by the kernel. This, of course, requires a kernel built with the APIC_IO and SMP kernel options. Lacking a SMP system, I haven't tested this. This is just what I see on the mailing lists and in CVSWeb
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
Looking at a full rack of DELL PowerEdge 2650s Dual Proc 2.8Ghz w/ 6 gigs of Ram and smiling. But they are already running Windows 2003 Enterprise Server. I wonder if the boss will let me take one of these $10,000 babies offline...YEA I WISH!
I presume you're one of the Doom 3 beta testers then?
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
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.
Years ago, there was the "LIM" (Lotus-Intel-Microsoft) for adding more than 640KB of RAM to a PC, by "windowing in" a section of RAM in a certain area.
It seems that, 20 years later, we're back to doing essentially the same thing.
No, this system doesn't work like that.
Intel processors since the Pentium have supported a system that allows you to use a larger page size than standard so that you can have more physical address space. You specify the start address of each page as 24 bits which are assumed to align to a 4K boundary which gives you 4M*4K = 16Gb of physical RAM. Each page is 2Mb in length. You can mix 4K and 2Mb pages in the same system, although not in the same quarter of the process adress space. So you get more actual physical memory, although each process is limited to 4G at once (whereas with LIM EMS the entire system was limited to 640K + 64K of 'banked' memory)