Subj : Re: Photographs of your BBS
To   : poindexter FORTRAN
From : tenser
Date : Wed Dec 20 2023 07:15:16

On 19 Dec 2023 at 07:15a, poindexter FORTRAN pondered and said...
 
 pF> -=> tenser wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-
 pF> 
 pF>  te> Would it have?  If the CPU supports PAE (or the equivalent for
 pF>  te> other architectures) you can still make use of the RAM, just
 pF>  te> not in a single virtual address space.
 pF> 
 pF> I didn't know that - all I knew was that 32-bit Windows would show a
 pF> maximum of 3.xGB available.

Oh, that's a bummer.

 pF> All I know of PAE are that older Thinkpads supported PAE but didn't
 pF> advertise it, so you'd need to jump through hoops to get some 32-bit
 pF> linuxes to install. There was a package called "fakepae" that would
 pF> report support for it.

Huh.  It's enabled by setting a bit in %cr4, and you can
probe support for it via CPUID.  My guess is that the
ThinkPad CPU probably supported the CR4 bit (and the updated
page table format) but didn't advertise it in the relevant
CPUID leaf; probably an oversight in the BIOS.  :-(

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
 * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

.