In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Alan Cox) writes:
>> where actually changed to get a 36 bit adessing limit instead of 32.
>> I'm still wondering if I was dreaming, but having machine which are sold
>> with 8Gig of Shared memory (unless they don't follow Intel SMP specsj
>> and use proprietary mechanisms) tend to prove that Intel actually
>> manufactures such beasts. If yes there is probably some initialization
>> magic to switch to this extended adressing mode ... Wasn't Intel supposed
> The extension is basically a warped variant of segment registers. You still
> get all the horrors of address range > cpu handles nicely.
> The documentation is in the Intel Xeon spec update stuff on intel.com
An quick easy hackish way to make first use of this memory in Linux is to write
an ramdisk driver for it, and use that as swap partition. In the long term
it might be useful to supply a system call like vm86() that supplies a
process a segment that points into the extended memory space. A bigger problem
is doing IO to/from such a segment or swapping it.
-Andi
