this post was submitted on 26 May 2025
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Linux

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 weeks ago (5 children)

Support for larger 32-bit x86 systems (those with more than eight CPUs or more than 4GB of RAM) has been removed.

What? How do you get more than 4GB of ram on a 32-bit CPU architecture? Now I need to know what kind of black magic they used for that

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

My understanding is previously the kernel would crash on systems with more RAM than the address space, so there's now a patch to ignore the anything above the max address supported (e.g. 32bit without PAE, 36bit with PAE). More RAM was never supported, so I think the author of the article has misunderstood or oversimplified what's been done.

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