Hi,

> well,
> I've just successfully installed RHEL5.11 and RHEL6.10 from i386 ISOs
> on virtio root disk + 64Gb RAM (upstream QEMU), and they booted
> to command prompt without any issues. 

Oh, interesting.  Apparently the physical address space is the same in
32-bit and long mode, i.e. on x86-64 hardware PAE paging mode can map 
physical addresses above 64G.

  rhel-6-32 kraxel ~# uname -a
  Linux rhel-6-32.lab.home.kraxel.org 2.6.32-754.35.1.el6.i686 #1 SMP Wed Sep 
16 06:48:16 EDT 2020 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
  rhel-6-32 kraxel ~# cat /proc/iomem 
  [ ... ]
  fffc0000-ffffffff : reserved
  100000000-17fffffff : System RAM
  7000000000-77ffffffff : PCI Bus 0000:00
    7000000000-7000003fff : 0000:00:02.0
    7000004000-7000007fff : 0000:00:03.0
      7000004000-7000007fff : virtio-pci
  [ ... ]

So the 64G / 36 phys-bits apparently simply happens to be the limit
implemented by 32-bit processors (and early 64-bit processors from
intel too).  It's NOT a hard limit for PAE paging mode.

So I'm wondering why the 32-bit guests are running into trouble in
the first place?

Also using the 64G as indicator for the heuristics doesn't look that
useful any more ...

take care,
  Gerd

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