A whole year after the Be IP buyout from Palm, BeOS 5 PE still enjoys more than 2,500 downloads per week. However, new hardware creates problems to BeOS, as it does not support new graphics cards, sound cards, new chipsets and worse, doesn’t even boot on AthlonXP’s or many Pentium4s without the usage of patches/hacks that are floating around. The latest sad incident is the inability of BeOS to boot when you have lots of system memory and lots of virtual graphics memory.There is 1.25 GB addresses 0x10000000 to 0x5fffffff in which the BeOS kernel creates kernel areas and physical_ram is allocated from there. The size of physical_ram is the amount of RAM in the machine, rounder up to the closest power of two. This means that BeOS wouldn’t boot at all if you stick more than 1 GB of memory. Other things are allocated between these addresses are the framefuffer for the graphics card and the loader cache (all the binaries you would load in the system).
The framebuffer is allocated with the size the graphics card reports to the PCI level. So, even if you have a 32 MB Radeon, the Radeon might be reporting more, up to 128 MB, and that is what BeOS is “believing” it has. For example, the nVidia driver found on BeBits for the nVidia cards, also maps whatever the PCI says, and not what the graphics card has on it. My GeForce2 MX400, has only 32 MB VRAM, maps 128 MB plus 16 MB for some register special stuff. That means that this 32 MB graphics card maps 144 MB out of the 1.25 GB memory allowed under BeOS. The new ATi Radeon 8500 for example, has 128 MB of VRAM in it, and it maps a whopping 256 MB of VRAM, because this way, ATi doesn’t have to re-engineer a future version of Radeon to have 256 MB. Problem is, that the BeOS drivers, and especially the VESA driver, do not ask the card how much memory really have on, but ask the PCI bus which gets the information from the card itself, but the number reported there is how much memory they would be able to work with, and not how much they already have on.
If you bought a new graphics card and BeOS doesn’t boot, take out some system memory. Also, be advised that when you have the BeOS machine loaded with much system memory (eg. more than 512 MB rounds to 1 GB) and graphics memory (which might be as high as 256 MB even if you might only have a 64 MB card) and that the overall mapping is close to 1.25 GB overall, it won’t let you run big apps, like BeZilla that require lots of memory, because it won’t be much memory left to use for applications! It is all used from the system allready. To check how much memory you have left, do a: “listarea > myMemory” on a terminal and then examine that myMemory file.
Solution:
Never use more than 512 MB of RAM with BeOS. In fact, 256 MB is what BeOS was optimized to use anyway. Also, make sure that your graphics card is an older, supported one, with no more than 32 or 64 MB of VRAM. As there is no OpenGL for BeOS 5, even a 8 MB graphics card would do the job perfectly. Oh, and don’t throw away that old PII or PIII you have if you want to continue using BeOS in the years to come.
Guess I’m in good shape, I just down graded to a PII today. The problems of Beos on hardware will only grow, even when Be was alive there was big problems here. For many this won’t matter, most likely if you are upgrading to something faster your computer that ran Beos will still be around, or in a few months all the parts from one computer will have been stripped so your Beos Box will be back in busniess, then you can have two computers. Beos doesn’t need the fastest hardware, there is nothing for it that needs fast hardware. Or rather faster hardware than what it currently runs. I can live with Beos on my other computer for a long time, well till OBOS is out and up to the same level, then i can look forward to it on new hardware.
BeOS may be falling behind in some areas of hardware compatability but I am writing this on a machine with 768mb of ram & a 32mb video card… I have never had any problems with memory being soaked up or used in odd places… infact it’s rare I see my memnory go past 140 – 160mb’s used… Note I DO NOT use a swap file so I run off my ram. So unless there is somtghin I’m missing BeOS can & should handle up to 768mb of ram with no problem… I also know of some one running Be on a system dual p3 with 1.5 gig of ram & a 64mb Radeon – no probs… So is there a loop hold going on?
People seem to forget that Microsoft pushes for the latest and greatest in CPU and GPU. Every year, systems are dumped for something more powerful. The amount of underpowered systems out there far outnumbers the niche of the latest systems to hit the market. Couple this with consumers who get annoyed because they are ‘forced’ to upgrade their hardware when they buy a new OS update and you have a market just waiting to be tapped!
Kon : no, it s not microsoft alone who does that … Games company too, apple and so on push for the last CPU/GPU/Memory …
<em>Oh, and don’t throw away that old PII or PIII
you have if you want to continue using BeOS in the years to come.</em>
yeah, we all know this, but it still hurts to read it….
To all you BeOS experts on the board …
I’d like to give BeOS a spin just for the hell of it (I’ve never tried it before). How much trouble would I have getting it up and running on a P3-450 w/196MB RAM, an Abit BH6 (Intel 440) motherboard, and a 16MB Diamond Viper (TNT2 Ultra) vid card?
I’ve got an Audiophile 2496 sound card in there which I’m sure probably won’t work, but I don’t really need sound for test driving purposes anyway
@Jess (RE: 512 BAH!)
Pretty much the same here. Duron 700; 704 MB RAM; GeForce2MX 32MB; No swap file
No problems so far.
@Darius (RE: I’m curious …):
Should be no problem. You hardware is “old enough”
.
Be sure to get the unofficial BeOS 5.04 Develpoer Edition from bezip.de instead of the plain BeOS 5 PE since it allready comes with most updates avaiable.
“A whole year after the Be IP buyout from Palm, BeOS 5 PE still enjoys more than….”
_Is_ a news item and if true, is something to remark upon.
“However, new hardware creates problems to BeOS, as it does not support new graphics cards, sound cards, new chipsets and worse…….”
Is a platitude and should be fairly obvious to anyone given that the company went tits-up.
Its hardly surprising or ‘newsworthy’that BeOS doesn’t run on newer hardware.
> I am writing this on a machine with 768mb of ram & a 32mb video card… I have never had any problems with memory being soaked up or used in odd places…
This is because you don’t know how to count. The fact that process controller shows you that the user space only uses 100 MB, that doesn’t mean that BeOS’s kernel hasn’t allocated all the rest of internal mapping that leaves you little room to load big applications. You are obviously not a developer, so I do not expect you to understand what the real issue is here.
> Be sure to get the unofficial BeOS 5.04 Develpoer Edition from bezip.de instead of the plain BeOS 5 PE since it allready comes with most updates avaiable.
I would advise against 5.0.4 DE. It is buggy. Just get the plain 5.01 and then update it to 5.03. All the updates are on BeBits on the page linked above, and it should work fine on your PC.
> Its hardly surprising or ‘newsworthy’that BeOS doesn’t run on newer hardware.
The article is about GIVING A SOLUTION to a problem that it WAS NOT KNOWN to wider audience before. In fact, the issue came up only 3 days ago when AdamK bought a brand new shiny ATi Radeon 8500 128 MB card, to use with his 768 MB RAM PC. And of course, it didn’t work, because the new 8500, maps 256 MB of VRAM.
That was the article about. Now, peoople might have a clue in the near future why BeOS doesn’t boot. And that IS newsworthy.
“Never use more than 512 MB of RAM with BeOS.”
BeOS was 64 bit system developed to solve these legacy problems, right? I love BeOS but every day we read news how it doesn’t support this or that. Crap, even Windows95 works on Athlon.
> BeOS was 64 bit system developed to solve these legacy problems, right?
No. BeOS is a pure 32-bit OS. Only SOME sctructures on the filesystem are 64-bit, and that’s about it.
Its JLG fault
let your b/f write instead ;D
btw ..thanks for posting beos related news keep up the good work!
/Robert
beos pe works just fine with my geforce 4 mx and my workstation/s are running beos exclusively.
How do you run a GeForce4MX on BeOS? Via VESA? Because the nVidia driver on BeBits does not support that specific model. Did you hack the driver to add its PCI id?
vesa accepted.. np.. why do you ask?
and yes i had some problems at first to get it running with theat unified nvidia driver
but as i said..im not experiencing any problems..
and ill try to whip together a driver for it as soon as i get this api and beos coding philosophy clear to me !
As time goes on, all that is learned about the Be/hardware situation is newsworthy.
That untapped market of older PC’s is really a great point. In fact, I’ve bolstered my Be situation recently. For some time I’ve had a version 1 iPaq desktop (Celeron, 512 MB)) at 500 MHz on my home lan and it’s been great. But, I’ve just recently, from eBay, got a version1 iPaq desktop with PIII at 733 MHz (also 512 MB) – wow, does it fly!! Both have the Intel 810 chipset and everything works, even sytem sounds. I also, on a hunch, got , of all things, a GateWay Astro XL, which was their attempt to mimic the original iMac. It’s all USB and also has 810 chipset. It’s turned out to be great – 533 MHz Celeron, 128 MB RAM (the max), sound, ethernet, everything. The big surprise was – and this was not even advertised in the eBay listing – it has an IDE CD Burner that’s supported!!
I also got a couple of nice HP inkjets in close-out sales that are supported by BinkJet 2 and 2.5. And…I just got two Epson 640u scanners that Epson is trying to get rid of for practically nothing. So, lol, I’m pretty well set!
If you’re interested in trying Be, those iPaq desktops are great, especially version 1 with the 810 chipset. There are always several on eBay. Even if they have no monitors, I know the current Compaq 15″ CRT for $129 is still compatible and carbon Labtec speakers (at Compaq) for $35 are compatible.
Yes, my AthlonXP 768 MB of RAM, plus the 144 MB of the nVidia mapped memory works here too. But people with more than 512 MB of system memory and 256 MB of mapped graphics memory (*even* if their cards might only have 64 or 128 MB of VRAM), OR, people with 1 GB of memory, plus more than 64 MB of *mapped* VRAM, they wouldn’t be able to boot.
For example, a user with 1 GB of memory and with an i810 2 MB graphics card or 4 MB graphics card WILL be able to boot. A user with 1 GB or 768 MB of system memory withe graphics cards that report more than 64 or 128 MB of mapped memory, wouldn’t boot.
So you always need to add up information and make calculations in order to see if it will work for you. It depends on the driver, it depends on the card.
It is not black and white.
“To all you BeOS experts on the board …
I’d like to give BeOS a spin just for the hell of it (I’ve never tried it before). How much trouble would I have getting it up and running on a P3-450 w/196MB RAM, an Abit BH6 (Intel 440) motherboard, and a 16MB Diamond Viper (TNT2 Ultra) vid card?
I’ve got an Audiophile 2496 sound card in there which I’m sure probably won’t work, but I don’t really need sound for test driving purposes anyway
”
Don’t know about the sound but i have a similiar setup and it works for me. i have an aopen i440bx ax6bc with 16mb diamond viper tnt and it works perfectly
you can email me at [email protected]
Why would Darius or anyone else want to buy your BeOS 4.5?
80% of the 3,000 applications found on BeBits, won’t work on R4.5, because apps compiled for R5 do not work on earlier versions (but apps compile under earlier version DO work on R5). R5 it is backwards compatible, but R4.5 is not forward compatible. So, please, do not try to trick the man from a better BeOS experience.
Darius, if you want to try BeOS, try the free BeOS 5 PE as linked above. You don’t need to buy anything. Everything is included there. Except 2-3 video codecs and the ancient Real Player 6, which are only part of BeOS 5 PRO.
Does anyone have a tip on how I can run BeOS again on my Dual Athlon XP machine? I come to the boot screen and then I only see stripes on my screen. Safe mode, etc does not work.
BeOS should run on this configuration:
Tyan Tiger MP mainboard
2x Athlon XP 1700+
256 MB memory (Dane-Elec)
Maxtor DMAX 40 GB HDD
Pioneer DVD 10/40
Plexwriter 16/10/40
ASUS V7700 (GForce 2 TI – 64MB)
SB Live 5.1
These are the most important things for you to know. Places messages on begroovy has never helped for me. So, maybe you can help me? 🙂
Darius, Eugenia is right – try out BeOS PE. I was talking about those iPaq’s, etc. because of the comment about there being zillions of older PC’s out there that will run BeOS, not because of your situation. Obviously, you would want to see if you liked it or not before you went looking for hardware.
You need to use the AthlonXP patch. http://wiki.bebits.com/page/InstallingOnAthlonXPorMP
The fact that most OSes have different drivers for the same hardware is a problem. For the hardware manufacturers because they are hard pressed as it is and can’t put a lot of money and effort in something that won’t make monetary sense with the limited resources they have. But also for the users, because they either recieve no drivers, bad drivers, or very late drivers.
Some OS, like Linux, has a big following, so some certain types of hardware get support from manufacturers, and other hardware get hacked support from devoted followers. But a perfectly working driver for Linux won’t help the BeOS users much now will it?
BeOS in many ways are a dead OS as well, because the owners doesn’t really want to develop it, which is a shame. But that also means that the driver support will dimished with time, and any free copies of BeOS will have to work on both trying to duplicate copyrighted work (tricky by itself), but also on writing drivers for poorly documented hardware. Sometimes poorly documented for good reasons (nVidia would be fools to loose their driver trade secrets when their Windows drivers are giving them good value. Anyone thinking something else must be ignoring economical and developing facts).
What would the solution be? How come X does a VERY crappy job supporting your brand new GFX card? How come I can’t fully use this and that piece of hardware out of the box at once? Because Microsoft and (to some degree) Apple are big enough to warrent “must have driver support”, while there are little support trying to support Linux, *BSD, AtheOS, BeOS, Plan 9, etc.
How would it be if driver support were easier for the hardware manufacturers? How would it be if the driver APIs were unified among the alternative OSes. How about if I can download a driver and run it on any version of any of the alternative OSes? How about the hardware manufacturers didn’t have to care about different versions of Linux, trying to somehow patch the ever changing trees.
Unified Driver Architecture. It is very much possible, in theory. There is nothing that stops it from being a reality as for as technical questions go. Yet it will never become a reality as long as there are so incredibly many factions that does not work together as a unit to define, set up, administrate, and produce a top notch DDK for hardware manufacturers and OS developers and developers with more spare time than they can use.
Somehow I feel like a single note, played for an instant, in an everlasting ocean of white static noise. Yet somehow I sound the note, and I dare to dream…
I don’t know what you did when you heard about the sale of BeOS to Palm. My first reaction was to print a copy of the hardware compatibility list from the website. It’s right here on my desk… somewhere. Hmm, guess I should probably refer to it as a “mesk”.
OK, you buy a CPU, and all over the net you have information about how to program in ASM, how to bang the registers, how much cache it has etc. You buy an nVidia graphics card, and you have ZERO information about how to bang the card directly, not without signing a NDA. For <insert Deity here> sake, I purchased a programmable piece of hardware, if I wish to PROGRAM it, the manufacturer should allow me to do it. The whole driver issue becomes void if manufacturers actually supplied info on how to bang the card, and initialise it. Some manufactures do (ex 3dfx), some dont.
Hmm, looks as if I need to take my money elsewhere.
Check the comments of http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=1475&limit=no
about UDI (Unified Driver Interface).
It’s a project to stanardizize the driver interface across different OSes. There are big names on he UDI list, but it seems that there’s no real interrest on supporting that project any further.
AFAIK, the 5.0.4 edition does not have 5.0.1 update applied, which is needed to run BeZilla, the BeOS port of Mozilla.
PE is 5.0, you then need to apply the 5.0.1 update, and then , the 5.0.3. 5.0.3 is mainly a security fix for ftp.
I could be wrong about 5.0.4, but, IIRC, the only REALLy good thing about that is that it has the P4 and AMD patches/hacks already applied.
I believe I have *seen* that boot on a P4 with about 512RAM and a 64MB TNT2 video card.
If your system does not boot because of too much RAM then please, kindly reduce your RAM and send the extras to me
ciao
yc
Dano and/or a BONE-enabled BeOS installation is EVEN WORSE than BeOS 5. Their limit is around 768 MB and not on the 1.25 GB. In order to have BONE working they did some changes in Feb. 2001 that made the limit even worse, but I do not think that the kernel team ever went back to fix the problem and give back that 1.25 GB of address space.
… what the hell is Virtual Graphics Memory?
Games or bla bla… why you need a new comp until OBOS R2 is released anyway? It’s not like BeOS is bloat remember?
If you choose Be, you’ll be fine with some cheaper hardware as it will work like the latest box and a lot better becuase it’s BeOS!
Try it today, download 5.0.4 from http://www.beosonline.de
I also use a crap Athlon mobo with 768M ram & Creative Blaster boards as the main video, BeOS works fine. If I reboot to W2K, the 3rd bank is a problem so I have to take it out for W2K to boot. Um, not only that I can no longer even do a fresh clean W2K install on this mobo (even with 256M) or even install elsewhere & cross boot on it, can’t remember how I got it running in the 1st place, guess I have to frig the Bios. So much for eBay buying & no name boards. Clearly W2K can have problems too.
It is esp difficult to build a modern PC that can multiboot to so many OSs with conflicting requirements although BeOS is pulling in the simpler is best direction.
I’ve got BeOS 5 up and running and updated to 5.0.3. I can click on things, but I have no mouse pointer (Intellimouse Optical both w/ and w/out PS2 adapter). Can this be fixed? Where do I find help?
Anyway, I think the fact that I could mount my Win98 partition and run the updates without a visible mouse pointer and without ever having seen the OS before gives me the impression that BeOS is pretty user-friendly
I must admit, I got lucky when I originally tried out BeOS PE, because everything I had on my system was already supported. My main computer is an old VX Pro+ motherboard with an AMD K6-200Mhz processor. I ran it with 32MB RAM for the longest time, and eventually upgraded it to 96 Megs, after I found out the hard way that my mobo didn’t support 128MB DIMMs. 🙁
But for now, I recommend that people who want to run BeOS check out the Hardware Matrix at the Frizbe website ( http://www.frizbe.net ). The matrix lists hardware that BeOS users have tried out, and shows how well they worked with BeOS. More people contributing to the matrix would be helpful, too. 😉
Somehow I feel like a single note, played for an instant, in an everlasting ocean of white static noise. Yet somehow I sound the note, and I dare to dream…
HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! You sound you like you’re talking about how to get world peace.
“Dare to dream..” riiighht… are you being prosecuted for you ideas? Sounds like you are standing up to incredible odds here.
Jesus, get off you high horse, Mr. John Holierthanthou.
By the way, the answer here isnt to create some new driver standard, it will never be adopted by the big projects (*BSD, Linux). Right now the alternative OS with the most hardware support is linux so just adopt that as a standard. This would automatically make the entry barrier for smaller OSes much lower. Hardware support is always where they fail otherwise. But yeah, linux should really stop changing their driver architecture around all the time. If a driver was made for kernel 2.0 it should still work for the whole 2.x series.
http://www.projectudi.org/
Is (was?) an effort to make drivers universal, it has been looked at by OBOS but I don’t think this effort has gotten traction just yet.
The names behind it include Intel, AMI (BIOS), HP, Compaq, Caldera, Sun & many others.
Remember USB1.0 went nowhere for quite a while, devices didn’t even always work properly. Apple effectively made 1.1 the std it is today even though it came from Intel.
Firewire has been in the works for 10yrs, it isn’t on most PCs so does that make it dead, no.
Perhaps UDI will take off too, it bears looking at. If the Linux people would use it, it would help all the smaller OSs out. There is a reference implementation at
http://www.stg.com/udi/
Someone mentioned above that BeOS 5.0.4 developer edition can’t run BeZilla.
That’s not right, as I’m doing it right now without having applied any extra patches.
That’s all.
Don’t throw away those old powermacs either, BeOS call run on those to
Darius, to get your mouse pointer back:
1. MAKE SURE you boot with a boot floppy and not via double clicking it via Windows (c:BeOSMakeBootFloppy.exe or something).
2. Make sure your BIOS has “IRQ ASSIGNED to VGA” or something.
That’s all.
If you got more problems, just email me.
I have 768MB of memory, and a 64 MB Geforce3 TI-200 vid card, and I boot.
VitViper, please read my comments found on 16-30 place where I explain more. Do not post uninformed comments please. It is NOT black and white.
Your GeForce3 only maps 128 or 144 MB MB or VRAM, not 256 MB. This is why yours AND mine machines with 768 MB of RAM work. Try adding *more* Ram than 1 GB, or get a gfx card that maps 256 MB of VRAM with your 768 MB of RAM, as AdamK did last week, and you will NOT be able to boot.
But… I have 1.5 gigs of system memory and a radeon8500 and it boots fine! Just kidding of course.
But seriously, thanks for the tip.
Ok, maybe it’s because I’m a carry-over from the OS/2 world, but I don’t upgrade regularly. Plain and simple. I buy older things because #1, bugs have been worked out, and #2 it’s cheaper than the bleeding edge. MOST people who run alternate OSes don’t stay bleeding edge anyway, and yes, you Linux folks included.
I still run OS/2 on a PPro 200, and happen to have it on a 486 also. Still runs perfectly. Those of us who run alternate OSes know it’s HCL and tend to stick to it, because, yes, that’s what it was designed for.
There is no need for a GeForce 4 in BeOS, because as you stated, there is no OGL and really, what would all that extra hardware/memory/speed of the card do ya in 2D? Same for my other OS, which by the way has a Matrox card in it like all of my Be-based systems do. All that fancy garbage is for high-end gaming on Wintendos or doing CAD on them, too. And this isn’t the OS right now for those kinds of things.
I’m not sure how truthful that is …
I use to run BeOS on my P4 with 512mb of RAM plus a sweet GeForce 3 Ti 500.
All worked fine (except for the P4 issue, which was fixed by a patch or a workaround in Safe Mode)
Chances are if you’ve got more than 1GB of RAM in your home system, you need to split that box into two. You’d only have 1GB of RAM if you’re running a server.
512 MB of RAM do not post a problem. And the Ti 500 only maps 128+16 MB of VRAM. Your system does not overflow to 1.25 GB of allowed address space. This is why it works.
As I said, it is not black and white. You need to calculate stuff.
UDI is/was targeted at unix server hardware, and is supported by OS’s like SCO UNIX. The hardware that has been supported tends to be network cards and drive controllers.
It isnt aimed at video cards, sound cards, or other random stuff, and the psec shows it.
Additionally, it is tightly controlled by the members, and they have no desire to have UDI participating in open source OS’s.
Does anyone know where there is a list of what the max memory that all the popular operating systems will support? Some of the info is a bit hard to locate and I suspect that this has only become an issue recently when such large memory machines have come onto the market.
P
Thank god I can’t afford a top-of-the-line computer! 🙂
Don’t worry, OpenBeOS should be there for you…for years to come
sorry Euginia, your post contains some good stuff, and I actually learned something, but you have at least 2 facts wrong.
First, Dano does NOT have a 768MB address space limit … it MAY and probably does have a 768 MB physical RAM limit. We use Dual PIIIs, with 768 MB of RAM , Dano, and 32MB Radeon 7200 video cards (OpenGL Beta), with great success – and it obviously leaves the address space for large user programs, because OUR program is in user space and requires over 400MB memory when maxed out (hence we cannot use 512MB to run it). Also, we successfully run our program with 1GB of RAM when using BeOS 5.03, but with Dano it will not boot with mroe than 768MB memory. The 1.25 GB limit is correct I’m sure, and Dano either lowers it to about 1GB, OR uses a different mapping scheme or larger TCP/IP stack … but 768 works fine, and DOES give more usable memory.
Second, there is no way that BeOS round up to the nearest power of 2, or else 768 MB could not boot when 1GB will not boot (since your hypothysis says they would both be 1GB) … and we have used 768 in every system we ship .. when 1GB will NOT boot (with Dano and Radeon).
Keith McAfee
Sweetheart, it rounds up to 1 GB, but the actual limit in this case is 1.25 GB. This is TRUE for BeOS 5.
Dano may be a bit different, but all I know is that Dano actually lowers the limit.
… and it’s got what was the latest GeForce as of January this year. What the hell, it ran just as fast on our older PII 450 (i.e., instantaneous).
Hey Peter…
The short answer is “It’s complicated”
On full 64-bit systems there are generally no limits smaller than those imposed by the hardware (e.g. # of address lines)
On AMD and other Intel-compatible systems maximum installable RAM is 4GB, with most consumer hardware limited to 1-2GB. On Intel’s own CPUs the limit is increased to 64GB by using a trick from 64-bit systems, an additional indirection in the page table system called PAE.
When I last looked there was PAE support in Solaris x86, Linux and NT. In each case it requires a special kernel, on NT that costs extra (maybe $5000) Basically this means the total RAM available to the OS is up to 64GB, but it doesn’t change the fact that individual userspace apps can only “see” approx 3GB of memory.
NT goes one further by offering a “large memory” API similar to the DOS memory managers of ancient times. This allows specially written applications to allocate >4GB of RAM and then access it through a sliding window. On Linux and Solaris you are advised to buy 64-bit hardware instead
Even without “clever” tricks like PAE most operating systems encounter problems at around 1GB due to a design choice, Eugenia has explained how this impacts BeOS, but it’s a common decision, and a perfectly sensible one — in 1995. A fast and simple split gives ~ 1GB to physical hardware (mostly RAM of various kinds) and 3GB to user virtual memory. If the OS is well designed additional RAM will be ignored, if not then the OS will crash or mysterious errors will occur.
An initial work-around for 1-2GB systems was to alter the split by manually setting a kernel parameter, NT 4sp3 offered 2:2 and 3:1 splits iirc and Linux 2.2 offered a configurable split. Beyond about 2GB this starts to break down because your virtual memory is now too small!
Now both NT (Win2K) and Linux (Kernel >= 2.4) use a strategy more like PAE, where the additional RAM is temporarily mapped when needed using a pool of virtual memory set aside for this purpose. This is slower than a simple split, but since users are determined to push 32-bit systems way past their design lifetime we must do our best. There is no penalty for users who have < 1GB of RAM with this strategy, and the penalty for users with 1-4GB of RAM is supposedly 1-2% of memory throughput.
In the Win9x series (including WinME) there are a number of defects which significantly reduce the usable RAM limit. You certainly can’t use more than 1GB in any version I’ve tested, and Microsoft’s KB articles acknowledge many problems above 512Mb (not to say it won’t work for some people).
Reports from BSD users seem to indicate that they’re still using the virtual / physical split with a configurable split ratio. I can’t find any info for OS/2.
I’ve been tossed into KDL a few times lately and it seems like this might be why. I have an Athlon XP 1900+ with 512Meg ram, and a Radeon AIW 32DDR video card. I’m set the extra memory option on the BeOS DF client to use 150Meg, but whenever I try to open the mail module of BeZilla poof! welcome to kernel debug land…
There is a newer Radeon driver being developed which might be able to set the correct memory settings. I’ll make sure the team knows about these memory issues.
-Scottmc
http://www.bedrivers.com