SBDavid
Feb 17th, 2013
Feb 17th, 2013
32 bit Architecture and the hugemem Kernel
32 bit Architecture and the hugemem Kernel
In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4 or 5 the smp kernel can be used on systems with up to 16 GB of RAM. The hugemem kernel is required in order to use all the memory on systems that have more than 16GB of RAM up to 64GB. However, it is recommend to use the hugemem kernel even on systems that have 8GB of RAM or more due to the potential issue of “low memory” starvation (see next section) that can happen on database systems with 8 GB of RAM. The stability you get with the hugemem kernel on larger systems outperforms the performance overhead of address space switching.
