On Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:57:27 -0500, Sven Littkowski wrote:

> Please more information on PAE. I would be very interested to hear your
> experiences with it. And a link (but i am gonna search for it now, too).

Physical (or Paged) Address Extensions.  Wikipedia has an article on it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension

Basically, it's very similar to the changes that led to 32-bit protected 
mode.  If you've programmed in x86 assembly, you know about 
segment:offset addressing.  PAE is a similar concept, but instead of 
using 16-bit registers, it uses 32-bit registers.  The upshot is that you 
can use it to address memory > 4 GB.

I've used it on Linux boxen that have 4 GB of memory or more (though at 
least with SUSE Linux, the PAE-enabled kernels are installed if you have 
> 2 GB of memory, and using it with less doesn't hurt anything.  I 
believe in OpenSUSE/SLE11, they're going to just use PAE kernels 
consistently as if you start with a machine with < 2 GB and then upgrade 
to > 4 GB, you need to switch out the kernel currently).

Jim
-- 
 Jim Henderson, CNA6, CDE, CNI, LPIC-1
 Novell Training Services

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