Michael Core <520079546242-0001@t-online.de> writes:

> > You'll only be able to use 4G with NetBSD, to my knowledge.
> > BTW, how does 8G work with a PRo ? I though only xeon could handle
> > more than 4G RAM.
> 
> IIRC the Pentium Pro has a 36-bit address bus but I thought it was only
> useful to handle upto 64GB swap space.

The trick is that only the *physical* address space is expanded to 36
bits; the virtual address space is still 32 bits. In principle, this
means that you could have, say, 32 processes, each using 2G of memory,
all resident, without swapping. But no single address space can access
more than 4G at a time. This includes the kernel's address space, so
managing this pile of memory requires some cleverness.

        - Nathan