Debian ia64 Install (WAS "4GB memory")

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Apr 04, 2008 at 09:34:03AM -0400, Giles Orr wrote:
> Thanks Lennart.  I still violently disagree with the naming scheme,
> but at least now I understand the very broken logic behind it.

Intel came up with the IA32 name when they did the itanium, and then
called the itanium IA64 to get people to think of the itanium as the
64bit future where x86 users should migrate.  Then the world promptly
ignored intel and the itanium and kept using IA32 until amd came out
with the x86_64 (amd64) which intel later copied and named em64t and
intel simply considers a memory enhancement for IA32 and hence consider
the architecture name to be IA32e.

> As for memory ...  I suppose it's time to call and bitch at Dell.  The
> amd64 kernel sees 3.3GB of memory on a machine with 4GB installed
> (just as it did with 32-bit standard kernel, 32-bit bigmem kernel, and
> Vista), and I see no BIOS options about it.

There are probably reasons Dell offers many machines with 2x1GB +
2x512MB rather than 4x1GB or 2x2GB.

I suspect they don't want to have to deal with tech support calls over
why people bought 4GB ram and only see 3.2GB, so they only sell them
with 3GB max in general.  After all they only sold 32bit xp and 32bit
vista in general which didn't support any ram mapped above 4GB.  I think
SP1 for vista added support for over 4GB if the system does PAE and has
the memory mapped, but dell would still have to update the bios to do
memory remapping.

Which Dell model do you have?

-- 
Len Sorensen
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