On Thu, 02 Dec 1999 15:44:22 -0800 
 Jonathan Stone <jonathan@DSG.Stanford.EDU> wrote:

 > So if i had a Xeon motherboard with >4 gigs of memory, or even >2gigs,
 > what'd be needed to get NetBSD to use it all?  I know some Lisp users
 > who're currrently using L**** who'd really like that.

Teach the pmap about the extended PTE format, then fix any bugs you
might encounter.

I know we run on 2G machines okay.... some of the bugs have been squashed
already :-)

 > >Dunno.  Though, I would assume that e.g. the SPARC pmap can cope with
 > >it, considering that it already has to use > 32-bit physical space just
 > >to access e.g. Sbus and on-board devices...
 > 
 > Yep. May not be quite the same thing as simultaneously mapping more
 > than 2^32 of physical memory, though.

I don't see what's so hard to grasp... no more than 2^32 will ever be mapped
at any given time (still a 32-bit virtual address space!), but that 32-bits
of *virtual* address space may access physical space outside the 0 - 0xffffffff
range.

        -- Jason R. Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov>