How much RAM does Mandrake 9 support?

[metz2000]

How much RAM can Mandrake 9 accept?

If I had a motherboard which could accept up to 4Gb then could Mandrake use it all?

Thanks, Metz.

[mdwatts]

Yes it would find and use all the 4GB.

The 2.4 kernel supports something like 64GB.

You may need to recompile the kernel to enable 4GB.

#
# Processor type and features
#
.
.
.
# CONFIG_NOHIGHMEM is not set
CONFIG_HIGHMEM4G=y
# CONFIG_HIGHMEM64G is not set
CONFIG_HIGHMEM=y
CONFIG_HIGHIO=y
CONFIG_FORCE_MAX_ZONEORDER=11
# CONFIG_1GB is not set
# CONFIG_2GB is not set
CONFIG_3GB=y

[bwkaz]

I believe that the Mandrake "enterprise" kernel will support highmem. Enabling highmem is recommended if you have 1GB or more of physical memory. If it isn't enterprise that supports highmem, then it's the -4GB kernel. But I think -4GB was a SuSE invention.

EDIT: What I mean is that appending -4GB to the kernel version was a SuSE invention. That could be read wrong...

[CMonster]

The 2.4 kernel can be customized to support upt to 64GB of ram - however, a 32bit processor cannot cache that much ram so a kernel customized to support 64GB will use part of the physical ram as a cache area for the rest of the memory. It might be a disadvantage to run a kernel that supports much higher memory than you actually have installed in the system.

[metz2000]

Thanks for all your help, I'll bear this in mind for future. Would I have to recompile if I installed Mandrake onto a machine with 4Gb or would it autodetect and configure itself accordingly...?

[mdwatts]

I'm not sure if the Mandrake 9.0 default kernel is configured for HIGHMEM. You will just have to install and see if it does.

free
or
cat /proc/meminfo

should tell you if all the ram is detected and being used.

My distro, SCO Linux (UnitedLinux) auto detected my 1GB/dual procs and installed the 64GB-SMP kernel and modules on installation.

[CMonster]

Mandrake 9.0 will install the 64GB kernel by default if you have multiple procesors, I'm pretty sure it installed the 4GB kernel on my single CPU boxs with 512MB, I'd have to double check though, since I am almost always in SuSE these days.

I'm testing Drake 9.1 RC1 on this Athlon dualie, and both the single CPU and SMP kernels that come with Drake 9.1 have "nohighmen" (under 1GB) configured by default.

Changing the kernel configuration is not that difficutl but you do need to follow the instructions carefully.