understanding applications and PAE

[Alan Cox]

On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 03:41:17PM -0500, Vanco, Don wrote:
> I understand that the Linux kernel can (through PAE) provide memory paging
> beyond 4GB of physical memory on 32-bit architecture.  What I need to
> understand is: what are the requirements on the application side to utilize
> this memory?  I'm looking for documentation / links that talk about
> applications and PAE.

PAE is transparent. Unfortunately its a half-baked solution in some ways
because it only fixed physical address space limits. So you get 3-4Gb depending
on kernel and configuration virtual per process even if you have 64Gb physical.

You can do EMS like stuff where you allocate a set of shared memory
segments and switch them in or out as needed. Its ugly but for some
tasks works very well.