4G/4G kernel patch dropped

Kenneth Porter shiva at sewingwitch.com
Tue Jan 4 12:11:53 UTC 2005


I just saw the announcement of a new Fedora kernel with this change note:

> A large change over previous kernels has been made. The 4G:4G memory
> split patch has been dropped, and Fedora kernels now revert back to
> the upstream 3G:1G kernel/userspace split.

A bit of googling indicates that the 4G:4G patch is needed for systems with 
a lot of RAM (eg. 32 GB or more) because the kernel memory tables scale 
with the size of physical memory and a 32 GB system uses 0.5 GB for the 
table, half the kernel space available to a 3G:1G system. A 64 GB system 
won't boot because all of kernel memory is needed for the table.

<http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0307.1/0246.html>

Was this reversion done for performance or for some other reason? I'd guess 
most consumer systems won't need 4G:4G as they won't have anything like 
that much memory, and it only makes sense for an enterprise class server.




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