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BSD Operating Systems

FreeBSD Looking for People with Lots of RAM 302

Posted by CowboyNeal 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."
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FreeBSD Looking for People with Lots of RAM More

FreeBSD Looking for People with Lots of RAM

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  • ARgghh (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cholo54alpha ( 665172 ) on Thursday April 10, 2003 @07:56PM (#5706941)
    MY dilemma is I have a lot of Ram but half of it is flakey!!! so I just tell linux to skip over it. It's really like having a regular amount of good ram. Hey, can BSD map my bad ram out too? Anyone?
  • Think of the size of the RAMDISK I could have with 4GB+! Goodbye swap space, hello disk space!

    • Re:Wow! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Struct ( 660658 ) on Thursday April 10, 2003 @08:37PM (#5707139)
      Jesus... I could even put the swap space ON THE RAMDISK! Think about how fast that'd be!

      • Re:Wow! (Score:3, Funny)

        by Sabalon ( 1684 )
        I went to a MS presentation when Win3.1 came out YEARS ago. In discussing the memory and swap abilities of 3.1, the rep actually said that you should not use RAM drvies for swap. He said you'd be surprised how many people actually did it.

        Ah...the good ole days when MS wasn't completly evil.

    • Re:Wow! (Score:2, Interesting)

      by knightinshiningarmor ( 653332 )
      We have an IBM machine with 40 (yes, that's forty) gigs of ram. It only has a 60 Gb hard drive, and it's not too full, so putting the entire drive in ramdisk isn't out of the question. However, if the power goes out, the UPS probably couldn't keep it up long enough to write everything back to the disk! :D

  • Volunteer... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by addaon ( 41825 ) <(addaon+slashdot) (at) (gmail.com)> on Thursday April 10, 2003 @07:57PM (#5706944)
    I have an HP LXR 8500 with four processors (currently) and 4GB of ram. I've been considering upgrading to 6GB for a while anyway. I'm currently using Windows 2000 advanced server on it, after being somewhat frustrated with Linux support a couple of years ago. I'd be more than willing to try out BSD, although I never have before. Is there anything I should know about this? I presume that BSD would run Mathematica fine under Linux emulation mode, as my main use of the box is just Mathematica crunching. Does FreeBSD make reasonable use of four processors? Anything else I should beware of? And anyone know a good source for cheap lxr-ready ram?

    • Re:Volunteer... (Score:3, Informative)

      by addaon ( 41825 )
      Also, if anyone is interested in a machine that can play at this level, check out auction depot [auctiondepot.com]. I'm not associated with them, other than having gotten my LXR dirt cheap (not as cheap as the link, needless to say) there. I can't say it's a sound investment, but if you want a toy you need a winch to get upstairs, you might find this fun.

    • Re:Volunteer... (Score:5, Informative)

      by UniverseIsADoughnut ( 170909 ) on Thursday April 10, 2003 @08:01PM (#5706967)
      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?
      • Can anyone confirm whether this is in 5.0 currently?

        • Re:Volunteer... (Score:5, Informative)

          by drdink ( 77 ) <smkelly+slashdot@zombie.org> on Thursday April 10, 2003 @08:27PM (#5707090) Homepage
          FreeBSD/i386 5.0-RELEASE Release Notes: Processor/Motherboard Support [freebsd.org]:
          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.

        • Re:Volunteer... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Thursday April 10, 2003 @08:37PM (#5707138) Journal
          Yes but its unbenchmarked

          FreeBSD 5 also includes Linux like threading. This has been one of the traditional weaknesses that are being addressed. Great java support as well. Since java uses threading heavily FreeBSD 5 will make it have server/workstation performance. Yahoo wanted to go with Java for their next generation portal software but Freebsd 4.x series had mediocre thread support.

          Freebsd 5.0 rocks! The only downside is that my Microsoft USB keyboard does not work with FreeBSD 5 on certain motherboards. I think its a bug and I hope its fixed soon.

          • "Freebsd 5.0 rocks! The only downside is that my Microsoft USB keyboard does not work with FreeBSD 5 on certain motherboards. I think its a bug and I hope its fixed soon."

            might be the chipset. My old IBM would run beos fine, just had no keyboard support, they keyboard was fine, it was something on the board. I don't think there are many keyboard chipsets in the world, or whatever the computer uses for it. But i found a non standard one.

            also you just gave me another reminder why I have no intent on buyin
            • also you just gave me another reminder why I have no intent on buying a USB keyboard anytime. Heck I have a usb mouse and it's hooked into the PS/2 jack.

              Well PNP keyboards and nice, and it even works with Xfree86 pretty well. Although, if you get a dell PS2 ports are hot swappable. I can't wait for legacy free machines to become mainstream, firewire and USB is all most systems need for externam connectors anyway, besides video I/O that is. Thats probally why I'm looking at getting a mac next computer.
              • "I can't wait for legacy free machines to become mainstream, firewire and USB is all most systems need for externam connectors anyway, besides video I/O that is. Thats probally why I'm looking at getting a mac next computer."

                Well by it's very nature the world of non macs can't just ditch the old stuff, because it's still out there and it wants to connect to new stuff. People have a lot of hard ware that needs old connectors. And things like PS/2 ports, well there is not reason to get rid of them, they work
                • so you gain nothing by making them USB.

                  Can't quite agree with that. With USB, you can hot-swap keyboards and mouse. This is rather important for servers and notebooks. You can even have multiple keyboards/mice plugged-in simultaneously.

                  Mayb be nothing you need, but you can't say there's nothing to gain. For the record, I dislike USB as much as anybody, but it's the only replacement for PS/2 available, so we're stuck with it (for slow, small, cheap devices at least).
                  • "Can't quite agree with that. With USB, you can hot-swap keyboards and mouse. This is rather important for servers and notebooks. You can even have multiple keyboards/mice plugged-in simultaneously.

                    Mayb be nothing you need, but you can't say there's nothing to gain. For the record, I dislike USB as much as anybody, but it's the only replacement for PS/2 available, so we're stuck with it (for slow, small, cheap devices at least)."

                    I have no problems with USB. I like it quit nice. But it wasn't till a bit ov

                  • Re:Volunteer... (Score:3, Informative)

                    by drdink ( 77 )
                    Most modern motherboards will let you swap PS/2 keyboards. I've unplugged mine and plugged it back in quite a few times without any problems. The last time I had such a problem was on my 486 SX25.
      • Mathematica stuff. A bit of everything, my attention wanders. Statistical analysis of cellular automata, parafoil design (low speed dynamics), trying to get a way to derive origami fold lines from a 3d model, path tracing... just stuff. Generally keep two or three processors full 24 hours, and try to keep one available for when I just want an answer. My main box is an iBook 600, so performance is simply not good... the Xeon 550's (2MB cache each) are much more performant for what I do.
        • " Mathematica stuff. A bit of everything, my attention wanders. Statistical analysis of cellular automata, parafoil design (low speed dynamics), trying to get a way to derive origami fold lines from a 3d model, path tracing... just stuff."

          haha, your mind sounds like mine. Once I graduate I intend to get working on various models (engine modeling mostly) and such that I dream up but have no time for. My dream model is to give a computer a few basic wants for an engine and it spits out the solution, the fu
        • "trying to get a way to derive origami fold lines from a 3d model,"

          Are you saying your trying to be able to say feed it in the specs of a coke can and it pops out the instructions on how to fold one? Sounds very neat. Also sounds like cheating. The guy who came up with the swan didn't have a 4 way Xeon :)

          Also if that is what it is, have you ever tried to get it to do a slinky, or a Sphere?

          yes all said mention items are on my desk now, to late for creative brain.

          • Re:Volunteer... (Score:3, Interesting)

            by addaon ( 41825 )
            Yes, that's what I mean. With regards to trying to do a slinky... honestly, I'd be happy with a swan right now. It gets the tetrahedron, finally, and the cube... but takes most of an hour to do it. Basically, I'm doing simulated annealing (gradient descent with a cheap hack to avoid local minima), and the problem space is just too unsmooth for it to be at all efficient. I think the solution is to find a way to smooth the problem space, rather than trying more powerful solution methods... but I'm generally d
            • This sounds like a very neat project. A differant way to approach it could be to have the thing to a all combinations of folding. That is give it instructions like, size of paper, and number of folds and have it produce as many combinations as it can, then give it what you want and it compairs to it's database of finished shapes. The data base could break down the results to groups of pattersn to shorten searchs. This of course would take massive computing.

              example could be tell it, 8 by 8 paper and 1

              • Re:Volunteer... (Score:3, Insightful)

                by addaon ( 41825 )
                The problem is scale. A nice origami model is easily 100+ folds. Let's say I ask for a hemisphere. By your approach, we'd generate a maximum number of folds (say, 40), and choose the closest. But that includes, of course, two trillion (2^40 + 2^39 + ...) possible models... and Mathematica, as a lisp implementation, isn't memory efficient, so we're talking tens of terabytes. With my model, I'm guaranteed something that looks reasonably good with quite low memory usage (hundreds of megabytes, usually)... it's
                • "At anyrate For what I was doing I was best by myself. I've very much a stare at it and make it in my head kinda person. I'm not trying to snub people, I just can design things with more then just my brain. And I don't think people like standing around till I say cut this or drill this.

                  Thats not to say I don't need help at times. But it's just the way I work. The only human I can ever co design with is my father, we share the same brain. We come up with the same ideas at the same time.

                  Last night you woul
                  • WTF, that was odd, windows pasted the wrong thing. Ignore the first 3 paragraphs. I don't know how that happened. I was responding to the lots of ram and number of models part.

                    I'm am so confused by how that happened

                  • Re:Volunteer... (Score:5, Interesting)

                    by addaon ( 41825 ) <(addaon+slashdot) (at) (gmail.com)> on Friday April 11, 2003 @12:05AM (#5708235)
                    Mathematica is slow, inefficient, and a total joy to work with. Matlab is about 10x faster, and at least 100x faster for matrix stuff (mathematica does matrices as linked lists of linked lists!)... but if I want speed, I'll use Fortran 90, really. Mathematica is just lisp + pretty printing... but it undeniably works, and I've never used a more productive tool in my life.

                    My basic method is to take a 3D solid (that is, a polygonal 3D model that encloses a volume). I apply a few standard smoothing operations to this model to get a very, very rough shape (in particular, I smooth it until it is fully convex, the first time). I then do simulated annealing based on a handful of hardcoded starting conditions to find a good approximation of that shape -- metropolis might work better for precision, but I decidedly don't want precision now. I then take the model and resmooth it, but one step less. I use the previous foldset as a starting point, and anneal from there. I repeat this for each level of smoothing that was originally needed.

                    Normally it takes around a million attempts to approximate each smoothing level, although this varies by a factor of at least one hundred, where the swan, for instance, takes about fifty levels of smoothing.

                    Make sense? Not saying it works wonderfully, but I think it's the correct approach and just needs tuning. Amount of work is, to a first approximation, linear with the geometric complexity of the model, and more or less independent of the number of folds... certainly not exponential in the number of folds!
                    • Indeed Fortran is one I intend to learn, took C++ instead for school, don't know if I flubbed or not. But so much stuff in engineering is fortran. I know many people reviving old fortran programs from the 70's.

                      Matlab I have been learning through college, though I still don't use it as much as I should. Currently learning Simulink which is part of it. For any kind of dynamic model it is great.

                      I think your project is interesting and is in need of a webpage that can get slashdotted some day when you get so

      • Re:Volunteer... (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I don't know if you could ever call it finished, but no they won't have "extremely good SMP". It will be OK though. The thing is they don't have the resources to do testing.

        If you look at Linux 2.5 for example, just about the entire time it has been worked on, people with 32 processor POWER4 machines with 256GB ram, 32 way IA32, etc. have been running benchmarks and optimising and posting results.

        This guy is having a hard time finding a > 6GB box to test with...

        Now Linux 2.6 will have "good SMP". Not
      • Informative?!

        Freebsd does SMP quit well. They have/are redoing the whole SMP system.

        If it works quite well, why does it need to be entirely redone?

        When finished Freebsd will have and extremely good SMP, if not the best.

        So advertise when it's finished.

        • " Informative?!

          Freebsd does SMP quit well. They have/are redoing the whole SMP system.

          If it works quite well, why does it need to be entirely redone?

          When finished Freebsd will have and extremely good SMP, if not the best.

          So advertise when it's finished."

          They had one system, they decided they could do better, so they made a whole new one. Makes perfect sence. You can always improve something, (except coca cola). At some point you relize somethings need to be redone even if the current setup works well

    • Re:Volunteer... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Brooks Davis ( 22303 ) on Thursday April 10, 2003 @08:13PM (#5707030) Homepage
      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
      • Sounds good. I currently haven't even looked at Grid, just using multiple processes and a rather large investment in licenses. :-) Thinking of going to eight processors soon, too. I'll see if I can pick up a few more sticks of RAM and give it a try, it'll mostly depend on what the prices on ram look like this week.

    • Re:Volunteer... (Score:5, Informative)

      by drdink ( 77 ) <smkelly+slashdot@zombie.org> on Thursday April 10, 2003 @08:24PM (#5707079) Homepage
      One thing you need to remember is that FreeBSD 5.x is currently still not -STABLE. This means it is the current development line. There is no guarentee or illusion of stability. That is why such big features as PAE, SMPng, x86-64, etc are being done there. If you are seriously interested in running a development version of FreeBSD, be ready to play a role in debugging, testing, and possibly watching things explode. That said, it has been pretty stable for me lately. If you are still interested, then please do the following:

      For those who are curious about what is new in -CURRENT compared to 4-STABLE, you can read the 5.0-RELEASE release notes [freebsd.org] for the bits that were new at the time of 5.0-RELEASE. More has come since.

      • Re:Volunteer... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Thursday April 10, 2003 @08:53PM (#5707207) Journal
        Bologna. Its not beta and its considered stable.

        Current != Release. I looked at there ftp site [freebsd.org] and only found -current or -Release versions. The only one mentioned as stable I found reading the docs are 4.0.

        Current = beta, and Release = stable. Stable= superstable or enterprise class stability.

        FreeBSD 5 is ready for %95 of user and server use. Its just as stable as FreeBSD 4.6 or 4.7 since they are also Release versions. Only 4.0 is considered STABLE at this point.

        However I would not bet my job on it with a server that needs to stay up 24x7 but FreeBSD 5 is as stable if not more out of the box as Redhat8 or Mandrake. FreeBSD hackers obsess about stability more then most linux hackers with the exception of Debian users. I would be cautious of course but to be release quality it needs to be %99.9 stable as opposed to %99.999 stable as 4.0 stable.

        • Re:Volunteer... (Score:3, Informative)

          by drdink ( 77 )
          Please see the Early Adopter's Guide [freebsd.org]. The specific part:

          At some point after the release of FreeBSD 5.0, a ``5-STABLE'' branch will be created in the FreeBSD CVS repository with the branch tag RELENG_5. The past two stable branches (3-STABLE and 4-STABLE) were created immediately after their respective ``dot-oh'' releases (3.0 and 4.0, respectively). In hindsight, this practice did not give sufficient time for either CURRENT or the new STABLE branches to stabilize after the new branches were created.

          Ther

    • Re:Volunteer... (Score:3, Funny)

      by nathanh ( 1214 )

      I have an HP LXR 8500 with four processors (currently) and 4GB of ram. I've been considering upgrading to 6GB for a while anyway. I'm currently using Windows 2000 advanced server on it, after being somewhat frustrated with Linux support a couple of years ago. I'd be more than willing to try out BSD, although I never have before. Is there anything I should know about this? I presume that BSD would run Mathematica fine under Linux emulation mode, as my main use of the box is just Mathematica crunching. Does

  • Hrm.

    1) Go to pricewatch [pricewatch.com] or e-bay [ebay.com] and buy a server that can hold greater than or equal to 4gb... and buy the RAM while you're at it.
    2) While waiting to ship - download the .iso's or whatever you'll need to prepare to install your OS.
    3) Server and RAM arrive! Snap RAM into server - take existing machine, put aside - plug KVM into new server - fire up - install OS.
    4) Test!
    5) ?????
    6) Profit!
    • ...Except Pricewatch ram sucks wang.

      Most of the "benchmark price" crap is C-grade or lower, and it doesn't even use 4-layer PCB. This is the kind of crap you give to the schools, not the stuff you put in enterprise-class servers with 99.999% uptime yada yada yada. Also, it's not the kind of stuff that you overclock.

      It has come to my attention that overclockers require a stable base to work on. Hence my assertion that Corsair or XtremeDDR-type ram is good stuff. I don't know if the enterprise-type d00d

  • Sweet! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Their test system with 6GB has 12 times the memory in my 512MB system (with maxed out RAM slots). Remind me again why 64-bit CPUs are needed...? ;)

    Joking aside, it's very cool - is support for more than 4GB of memory a first for 32-bit x86 operating systems? I believe Windows NT is limited to 2GB because it keeps half of the 4GB address space for virtual memory / paging (is this right?). At the very least it will help in the interim before native 64-bit x86 machines are commonly available - both in terms o

    • Re:Sweet! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by addaon ( 41825 )
      (a) 4GB+ on x86-32 sucks. I mean, it works, but it's a hack. x86 has a history of adding new hacks to make things work, then slowly evolving away the hacks into something workable on a longer time scale. PAE, how 4GB+ works now, was the right choice at the time; it's simply time to move beyond it, and x86-64 is it.

      (b) You can get 2GB dimms now... you may be able to get 4GB dimms, haven't looked, as my system (32 slots) doesn't need more than 2GB dimms. So if you really want more ram, check to make sure you

    • Re:Sweet! (Score:3, Informative)

      by drdink ( 77 )
      Windows 2000 Datacenter [microsoft.com] supports PAE.
      • So does Windows 2000 Advanced Server.
      • So does Advanced Server, and you can actually buy it, unlike Datacenter (which is OEM only, and basically customized for each system).

    • Re:Sweet! (Score:5, Informative)

      by Guy Harris ( 3803 ) <guy@alum.mit.edu> on Thursday April 10, 2003 @08:43PM (#5707160)
      is support for more than 4GB of memory a first for 32-bit x86 operating systems?
      No. The Linux 2.4.x kernel has it [com.com], and Unixware 7.1.3 has it [sco.com] (I don't know what release first supported it), and Solaris 7 and later has it as well [sun.com].

      As others have noted, Windows NT 5.0^H^H^H^H^H^H2000 also supports it.

      • Re:Sweet! (Score:5, Funny)

        by lpontiac ( 173839 ) on Thursday April 10, 2003 @08:54PM (#5707213)
        is support for more than 4GB of memory a first for 32-bit x86 operating systems?

        No. The Linux 2.4.x kernel has it [com.com], and Unixware 7.1.3 has it [sco.com]

        So the Linux kernel's support was obviously stolen from SCO, and therefore doesn't count.

      • Wasn't windows NT 5.0 the initial release of windows XP? I know I'm up to XP (partial) SP2 and it still only says Windows NT 5.1... I also know that early XPs identified as NT 5.0 through apache logs.
        I'm pretty sure 2000 was still in the 4.xx range of windows NT, although service packs way well upgrade it to 5.0 or 5.1 NT status.

        To stay on topic, and here I was still feeling like 2048 MB (2GB) of ram was still a lot. I guess not, time to upgrade(1) although I can only install 4 GB total, and thus can't a

        • Wasn't windows NT 5.0 the initial release of windows XP?

          No, NT 5.0 was renamed Windows 2000; I think the final release of XP was 5.1.

          I'm pretty sure 2000 was still in the 4.xx range of windows NT, although service packs way well upgrade it to 5.0 or 5.1 NT status.

          It seems unlikely that a service pack would change the major version number; I don't have a service-packless 2000 to test on, but W2K SP1 definitely identifies itself as "5.00.2195" (the 2195 is, I think, the build number). From everything I've

    • You are right about the default settings for NT4. It also has boot options that reserve only 1GB for the OS, so applications can get 3GB per virtual address space. I believe similar options exist for Win2K and XP.

  • Give it up! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Metallic Matty ( 579124 ) on Thursday April 10, 2003 @08:02PM (#5706975)
    Time for you high-end gamer freaks to give up some of that RAM you've been hording ;)
  • How many people out there have a mother board out there that will support this. I can't think of to many of them in the sane hardware level that would. Seams like most make out at 2gig even if you could phisicaly fit more in them. Are there many desktop level boards that support more?

    I know this is more of a test for those who have servers, but If you have such a machine chances are you can't take it down to test somthing on it.
    • we have a number of servers [dell.com] with 6GB of RAM. Linux requires a recompile for <64G (although debian distro only supports (from not so recent memory) ~900MB out of the box). Unfortunately, as most people don't seem to have read the article, it points out that you need to upgrade to CURRENT, and some drivers that use DMA are not available. As much as I'd like to help out, the chances of installing CURRENT onto a production server is about as good as the proverbial snowflake in hell. (and 4.8 has support for
      • Actually FreeBSD -RELEASE 5.0 is out. [freebsd.org]

        Its pretty stable. Not as stable as -Stable or the older freebsd 4.x -releases but its about as stable as most linux distro's. Its fine for non super critical server use and workstation use. I find FreeBSD more stable and mature then Linux and this is why I use it.

        It sounds like they are looking for testers anyway and no bussiness user is going to run critical software on an OS just for a test.
        • And -RELEASE doesn't have support for >4G. You have to cvsup to -CURRENT for >4G.

          That said, -CURRENT is pretty darn stable, although it dies on my laptop in odd ways (but so does linux and NetBSD -- Even Winblows has issues with it). IMHO, 5.0-RELEASE is only good as a bootstrap for 5.0-CURRENT, as there are SIGNIFICANT fixes in -CURRENT.

  • How would I build a 4 GB + System? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by XBL ( 305578 ) on Thursday April 10, 2003 @08:05PM (#5706990)
    What are the options beyond having an x86 motherboard with 4 RAM slots filled with 1 GB memory each? Is it possible to get hardware capable for this in a PC?

  • I've quoted it before.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by tedDancin ( 579948 ) on Thursday April 10, 2003 @08:08PM (#5707007)
    .. and I'll quote it again.. "640K should be enough for anyone".

  • People with lots of RAM (Score:3, Funny)

    by bigsteve@dstc ( 140392 ) on Thursday April 10, 2003 @08:16PM (#5707042)
    I guess I qualify. As I get older, I find that I'm remembering things pretty randomly. And I must have at least 4Gb of memories in there ... somewhere.

  • My current setup (12GB RAM) (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm currently running a workstation with 12GB of RAM. Where do I sign up?

    Specs:
    Intel SHG2 board
    Dual 3.06 XEON processors
    12GB DDR266 memory
    nVidia Quadro
    480 GB hard drive space in a 4-way stripped array

    My penis is normal size, thankyouverymuch.

  • Uh... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JanusFury ( 452699 ) <.moc.liamg. .ta. .ddag.nivek.> on Thursday April 10, 2003 @08:20PM (#5707059) Homepage Journal
    How would you test that? I can't think of any easy way to actually test that much RAM. What would you do, load 8GB of random data into RAM and compare it byte-by-byte with the original data?
    • Most people with that much RAM have it for a reason. Presumably, anyone who would volunteer to try this (like myself) is using a box for reasonably heavy crunching in a non-critical environment; in this case, just continuing normal crunching should be good exercise for testing.

    • Re:Uh... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 10, 2003 @08:56PM (#5707218)
      Just load up a Java application... Voila!
    • Same way you test 100MB of RAM -- set all the bits high, set all the bits low, load various patterns...

      But this isn't really a matter of whether the RAM works but whether the OS deals with it nicely. For that, you'd want to try malloc()'ing and free()'ing various amounts of RAM (and in very large chunks), forcing parts to page in and out, and so forth...

      In short, it's just a matter of a few hours' worth of C (if that).
    • Why not use Memtestx86? I know it boots off a floppy most of the time, but there is no reason you couldn'y compile it natively under *BSD.

      I wonder how long it would take to test all that RAM?

      I know my first test would be to install Neverwinter Nights and/or Unreal Tournament 2003 into a RAM drive...
  • Buy me the extra RAM and I'll do it.

    With apologies to Blake "buy me a Mac and I'll fix the bug" Ross [blakeross.com] (Mozilla bugs 75158, 76728, 77758, 81028, 88086, etc).
  • OK first off for those that insist that more than 4 gigs is only for server machnes scroll down a few stories and look at the 12 gig max 7505 chipset board. Now repeat after me if it hav an AGP slot it's not a server it's a workstation. Anyway can anybody think a good reason to run BSD with a pile of memory compared to say Linux????

    • Re:Easy (Score:2, Insightful)

      by tigga ( 559880 )
      Anyway can anybody think a good reason to run BSD with a pile of memory compared to say Linux????

      LiNUX??? Nooo, Thank you very much. Only FreeBSD.

      The reasons are cleaner design, better VM system, better network support (NFS especially), ports/packages system. In my experience FreeBSD has overall better device drivers support. Linux was supposed to work, but inconsistency with library versions and installed programs prevented it to work properly. If you have time you may recompile all needed pieces but

    • AGP slot (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Submarine ( 12319 )
      Well, you have to have a graphic board at least to boot and set up the system, and all current boards are AGP, thus the AGP slot.

  • Jesus Tap-dancing Christ! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 10, 2003 @09:05PM (#5707261)
    Talk about a fucking bloated OS!? 4 gigs of RAM? Not even XP Pro requires that much memory!

  • I have just the box for this... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Drakino ( 10965 ) on Thursday April 10, 2003 @09:10PM (#5707282) Journal
    Guess I'll have to put to use our lab DL760 G2 [hp.com] machine. Has 2.5 GB currently, should be able to find another 2.5 gb for it (Raid 5 memory overhead and all).

    How well does BSD work with Hyperthreading? The lab box has 4 HT enabled Xeons in it right now, and I could toss in another 4, resulting in 16 virtual CPUs.

    • Re:I have just the box for this... (Score:5, Informative)

      by drdink ( 77 ) <smkelly+slashdot@zombie.org> on Thursday April 10, 2003 @09:30PM (#5707399) Homepage
      FreeBSD supports Hyperthreading in 5.0-CURRENT. There is a sysctl variable called "machdep.hlt_cpus". You can use this variable to control which logical CPUs should be taken out of the idle loop and used by the kernel. This, of course, requires a kernel built with the APIC_IO and SMP kernel options. Lacking a SMP system, I haven't tested this. This is just what I see on the mailing lists and in CVSWeb [freebsd.org]

  • Rembember the LIM standard? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by callipygian-showsyst ( 631222 ) on Thursday April 10, 2003 @10:21PM (#5707672) Homepage
    Years ago, there was the "LIM" (Lotus-Intel-Microsoft) for adding more than 640KB of RAM to a PC, by "windowing in" a section of RAM in a certain area.

    It seems that, 20 years later, we're back to doing essentially the same thing.

    • Re:Rembember the LIM standard? (Score:4, Informative)

      by julesh ( 229690 ) on Friday April 11, 2003 @07:59AM (#5709710)
      Years ago, there was the "LIM" (Lotus-Intel-Microsoft) for adding more than 640KB of RAM to a PC, by "windowing in" a section of RAM in a certain area.

      It seems that, 20 years later, we're back to doing essentially the same thing.

      No, this system doesn't work like that.

      Intel processors since the Pentium have supported a system that allows you to use a larger page size than standard so that you can have more physical address space. You specify the start address of each page as 24 bits which are assumed to align to a 4K boundary which gives you 4M*4K = 16Gb of physical RAM. Each page is 2Mb in length. You can mix 4K and 2Mb pages in the same system, although not in the same quarter of the process adress space. So you get more actual physical memory, although each process is limited to 4G at once (whereas with LIM EMS the entire system was limited to 640K + 64K of 'banked' memory)

  • What happens if you have 6 Gigabytes? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 10, 2003 @10:42PM (#5707810)
    Looking at a full rack of DELL PowerEdge 2650s Dual Proc 2.8Ghz w/ 6 gigs of Ram and smiling. But they are already running Windows 2003 Enterprise Server. I wonder if the boss will let me take one of these $10,000 babies offline...YEA I WISH!

  • Eh. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Kourino ( 206616 )

    PAE never really excited me. I mean ... it's like EMM386, with 4GB instead of 1MB. It's a hack, and from what I hear (that is to say, what Will Irwin has said on LKML) PAE is fairly slow compared to regular memory, anyway. (And regular memory is already fairly slow compared to core CPU clock speeds, even with high-speed DDR.)

    I won't say people don't do >4GB on x86, because obviously they do, but there are reasons not many people do. :3

    • Re:Eh. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Guy Harris ( 3803 )

      and from what I hear (that is to say, what Will Irwin has said on LKML) PAE is fairly slow compared to regular memory

      What exactly did Will Irwin say? (Do you have a link to his LKML message?) It's not as if there's "PAE memory" and "regular memory" - if PAE is enabled, it's all regular memory, you can just use more of it.

      What he may have meant is that, with PAE extended, there are some things that are slower. With PAE enabled, you have a 3-level page table rather than a 2-level page table, and page tab

  • We've had this system for a couple years:

    bash-2.03$ uname -a ; prtconf | more
    SunOS largo 5.8 Generic_108528-14 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-Enterprise
    System Configuration: Sun Microsystems sun4u
    Memory size: 10240 Megabytes

    bash-2.03$ psrinfo
    0 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:03
    1 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07
    4 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07
    5 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07
    8 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07
    9 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07
    10 on-line since 03/1

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