On Mon, 17 Oct 2011, Stephan Wiesand wrote:
On Oct 17, 2011, at 18:20 , Yasha Karant wrote:
Yes: The 32-bit kernel will leave 25% of your 4 GB RAM unused, I believe. And
all processes will be confined to 3 GB of address space (even if purely
virtual). Increasingly, new features are only made available by TUV for the
64-bit flavour (KVM, xfs, samba3x on SL5, pNFS). Since the Java and Flash
plugins are now available as 64-bit builds, much of the hassle with running
64-bit SL is now history. x86-64 has a future, ia32 IMHO hasn't (x32 seems
interesting but will take a while to arrive and will use a 64-bit kernel). The
extended register set and faster PC-relative addressing are not available to
ia32 applications. A 500GB disk is plenty for installing the .i686 packages
alongside the 64-bit ones.
32-bit kernel can address more than 4GB of memory if the kernel uses PAE mode,
physical address extension, up to 40-bit.
Mike
