Hi,
I'll be getting a few new machines for a customer soon.
They will be SMP (dual processor Pentium-IV) with 4 GB RAM,
and I plan to install FreeBSD/i386 6-stable on them.
What's the current status of running with that amount of
memory? I'm not completely up to date in that regard, and
searching the archive didn't get any definitive answers.
I remember that there were several issues in the past, but
I have no idea if they still exist. They required fiddling
with VM_KMEM_SIZE_MAX, or KVA_PAGES or similar things.
Will FreeBSD/i386 6-stable run on a 4 GB machine out of the
box? Do I have to apply special tuning (kernel config or
sysctl or whatever)? Using PAE shouldn't be necessary, I
assume.
It would also be interesting to know if 4-stable (which is
currently running on the predecessor machines) would run
without problems on those new 4 GB ones, too.
Thanks in advance for any information!
Best regards
Oliver
--
Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing
Dienstleistungen mit Schwerpunkt FreeBSD: http://www.secnetix.de/bsd
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Oliver Fromme wrote:> Hi, > > I'll be getting a few new machines for a customer soon. > They will be SMP (dual processor Pentium-IV) with 4 GB RAM, > and I plan to install FreeBSD/i386 6-stable on them. > > What's the current status of running with that amount of > memory? I'm not completely up to date in that regard, and > searching the archive didn't get any definitive answers. > I remember that there were several issues in the past, but > I have no idea if they still exist. They required fiddling > with VM_KMEM_SIZE_MAX, or KVA_PAGES or similar things. > > Will FreeBSD/i386 6-stable run on a 4 GB machine out of the > box? Do I have to apply special tuning (kernel config or > sysctl or whatever)? Using PAE shouldn't be necessary, I > assume. > > It would also be interesting to know if 4-stable (which is > currently running on the predecessor machines) would run > without problems on those new 4 GB ones, too. > > Thanks in advance for any information! >The base install, running GENERIC will only use 3GB. I believe you would either need to use the PAE kernel option, or use the 64bit version of FreeBSD on a corresponding 64bit hardware. Eric -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Eric Anderson Sr. Systems Administrator Centaur Technology Anything that works is better than anything that doesn't. ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eric Anderson wrote:> > The base install, running GENERIC will only use 3GB.:[ ]. Why so?! How make FreeBSD to use 4GB? it is possible?
Oliver Fromme said the following on 03/14/06 08:30:> > Will FreeBSD/i386 6-stable run on a 4 GB machine out of the > box? Do I have to apply special tuning (kernel config or > sysctl or whatever)? Using PAE shouldn't be necessary, I > assume. >All it depends is what size of memory address space the motherboard manufacturer decided to reserve for PCI devices. I've seen boards with PCI window size ranging from 256 to 1024MB. In order to utilize the full amount of RAM you would need PAE.> It would also be interesting to know if 4-stable (which is > currently running on the predecessor machines) would run > without problems on those new 4 GB ones, too. >For 4-STABLE you would need to adjust KVA_PAGES. Otherwise, depending on the load and the memory usage, you might get random crashes. Or at least this is what I experienced when upgrading RAM on a bunch of 4.x based machines. Regards, Atanas