I think the trick might be that nothing is stopping you from using more than one 32-bit integer to represent addresses and the kernel maps memory for processes in the first place, so as long as each process individually can work within the 32-bit address space, it’s possible for the kernel to allocate that extra memory to processes.
I do suppose on some level the architecture, as in the CPU and/or motherboard need to support retrieving memory using more than 32 bits of address space, which would also be what somebody else replied, and seems to be available since 1999 on both AMD and Intel.
My understanding is previously the kernel would crash on systems with more RAM than the address space, so there’s now a patch to ignore the anything above the max address supported (e.g. 32bit without PAE, 36bit with PAE). More RAM was never supported, so I think the author of the article has misunderstood or oversimplified what’s been done.
What? How do you get more than 4GB of ram on a 32-bit CPU architecture? Now I need to know what kind of black magic they used for that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension
I vaguely remember something for Windows XP that allowed me to run more than 4GB RAM on 32-bit…
I think the trick might be that nothing is stopping you from using more than one 32-bit integer to represent addresses and the kernel maps memory for processes in the first place, so as long as each process individually can work within the 32-bit address space, it’s possible for the kernel to allocate that extra memory to processes.
I do suppose on some level the architecture, as in the CPU and/or motherboard need to support retrieving memory using more than 32 bits of address space, which would also be what somebody else replied, and seems to be available since 1999 on both AMD and Intel.
deleted by creator
My understanding is previously the kernel would crash on systems with more RAM than the address space, so there’s now a patch to ignore the anything above the max address supported (e.g. 32bit without PAE, 36bit with PAE). More RAM was never supported, so I think the author of the article has misunderstood or oversimplified what’s been done.