On Sat, 26 Apr 2008, Rene Herman wrote:
> But to repeat some advice I gave earlier today on list as well; do
> yourself a favour and ignore everything about PSE-36 and PAE (and
> preferrably highmem as well). Those are all hacks to a 32-bit
> architecture to make it support more memory than is natural for it
> and are simply obsolete due to the advent of x86-64. All that stuff
> is perfectly fine when you've grown into it through x86 history but
> which I personally definitely would NOT want to have to learn from 0
> at the moment. It's just obsolete rubbish now anyway.
that's pretty much my opinion these days -- life is too short to
spend time learning the painful details of how the page tables work
when it's just not worth the trouble.
on the other hand, it's probably worth at least understanding the
*concept* of that HIGHMEM area, so you can distinguish between the
difference in allocating memory in kernel space with kmalloc() versus
using vmalloc() on 32-bit systems. i'll admit i haven't looked
closely enough at what happens on 64-bit systems yet.
rday
--
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Robert P. J. Day
Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry:
Have classroom, will lecture.
http://crashcourse.ca Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA
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