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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."

8 of 271 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Volunteer... by UniverseIsADoughnut · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?

  2. Re:Volunteer... by Brooks+Davis · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Mathematica runs find under Linux emulation. We're currently working on getting Grid Mathematica into production on our FreeBSD cluster at work. It runs, but we haven't really done much with it yet because the real users are still working on understanding the programming model. FreeBSD should work well for you in this mode as long as you have the four licenses you'll need to keep the CPUs busy. The way Mathematica handles parallelism (seperate processes) should be able to take advantage of PAE.

    The one gotcha is that PAE is a bit bleeding edge at this point so moving to it may be intresting.

    -- Brooks

    --
    -- Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
  3. Re:64 + 128 + 256 + 16 + 224 + 64 + 512k.... by AgentPhunk · · Score: 5, Funny
    I've got 8 gigs of RAM in my old 286 running a hacked version of FreeDOS, so this isn't really news

    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.

  4. Re:Volunteer... by drdink · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.
    --
    Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
  5. Re:Wow! by Anonymous+Struct · · Score: 5, Funny

    Jesus... I could even put the swap space ON THE RAMDISK! Think about how fast that'd be!

  6. Re:Uh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Just load up a Java application... Voila!

  7. Jesus Tap-dancing Christ! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Talk about a fucking bloated OS!? 4 gigs of RAM? Not even XP Pro requires that much memory!

  8. Re:Wow! by Anonymous+Struct · · Score: 5, Funny

    I guess I need to work on my delivery... :)