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Technical Memory and OS question


pc-tecky

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Curious about 32-bit processor with 36-bit memory addressing capabilities like the old Pentium II's, Pentium III's and Xeon's that could address memory far in excess of 4GB RAM. So the perplexing question that I have is this: Where can one find an old 32-bit OS to run on this old school Xeon server and fully utilize the 8GB of ram that the motherboard supports?

 

The more perplexing question is how does this work and why haven't we seen higher memory capabilities in computers sooner?

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As far as I know, no 32bit OS will be able to address anything above the 32-bit limit. I've not heard of any exceptions to the rule.

 

Adam

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securitybreach

Any linux distro should be fine, just install the PAE kernel from the distro's repos.

The Linux kernel includes full PAE mode support starting with version 2.3.23,with Linus Torvalds mentioning PAE's 4 MB page support in 1.3.15, enabling access of up to 64 GB of memory on 32-bit machines. A PAE-enabled Linux kernel requires that the CPU also support PAE. The Linux kernel supports PAE as a build option and major distributions provide a PAE kernel either as the default or as an option.

http://en.wikipedia....Extension#Linux

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Hmm... That sounds very promising. So, was this ever an option for early Windows server platforms? Or strickly a Linux thing?

Edited by pc-tecky
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Hello,

 

The following 32-bit versions of Windows Server support more than 4GiB of RAM:

  • Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server (8GB)
  • Microsoft Windows 2000 Datacenter Server (32GB)
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise (64GB)
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Datacenter (64GB)
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise (64GB)
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Datacenter (64GB)

One thing to keep in mind is that while these operating systems do support more than 4GB of RAM through PAE, the device drivers for the various bits of hardware often do not work reliably with PAE mode enabled. Be careful to verify that device drivers for things like NICs, mass storage controllers and video cards work with PAE, otherwise the system may generate a lot of stop errors ("BSODs").

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky

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BTW the above mentioned issues do not apply to Linux.

 

Oh? There's no compatibility issues with PAE and various linux software/drivers?

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securitybreach

The laptop in question has ran Slackware, Debian and Archlinux with PAE kernels and the only thing that does not work OOTB is the wireless card (needs a binary driver installed - ipw3945).

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