Ubuntu

HIGHMEM64G is not enabled in Ubuntu Desktop 32-bit

Bug #179025 reported by freshinstall
6
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Ubuntu
Invalid
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

As of this filing 2 GB of RAM costs 20 US Dollars retail. Consumer motherboards supporting > 4GB of RAM can be had for < 200 US dollars retail. All consumer CPUs support PAE or native 64 bit addressing. Within 6-12 months it is conceivable that consumer motherboards will support from 32 to 64 GB RAM configurations at a low cost and 64 bit OS software support will only have incrementally improved in that time.

Recompiling the linux kernel simply to enable HIGHMEM64G is unacceptable as it requires a recompile/reinstall/reconfigure of all non-kernel drivers and reconfiguration of said, basically a manual reinstall of non-kernel functionality after kernel compile. The methods for doing so are poorly documented, error prone and do not meet a satisfactory usability criterion for the ubuntu user community.

Given the availability of low cost computing environments which exceed the standard configuration of Ubuntu Desktop 32 bit, I am requesting that this bug be filed so that future versions of Ubuntu Desktop 32 bit are not crippled in this fashion.

Revision history for this message
Eric Work (ework) wrote :

+1 Amen!

Revision history for this message
trollord (trollenlord) wrote :

...Except that HIGHMEM64 kernel also fails to boot on everything that does not support PAE perfectly or has a slightest bug in the support. Keep in mind the present hardware requirements of Ubuntu (works even for old computers), and the fact that LTSes must be around for several years. PAE would cause problems with surprisingly many computers, including potentially new clone chips such as VIA's creations... The amount of uncontent from that move would me major.

Furthermore there is 3-6% performance impact on everything memory related, and a single process still has 3G limitation in their addressing. This means that even computers with less than that 3G memory would get the performance hit. As much as I would want this to happen it is not feasible nor likely will be feasible to have such kernel as default. Just move into 64-bit Linux, it does run also every 32-bit application just fine. The time of running 32-bit distributions has been over for couple years already to be honest.

Revision history for this message
freshinstall (mailroom) wrote : Re: [Bug 179025] Re: HIGHMEM64G is not enabled in Ubuntu Desktop 32-bit

I agree

> ...Except that HIGHMEM64 kernel also fails to boot on everything that
> does not support PAE perfectly or has a slightest bug in the support.
> Keep in mind the present hardware requirements of Ubuntu (works even for
> old computers), and the fact that LTSes must be around for several
> years. PAE would cause problems with surprisingly many computers,
> including potentially new clone chips such as VIA's creations... The
> amount of uncontent from that move would me major.
>
> Furthermore there is 3-6% performance impact on everything memory
> related, and a single process still has 3G limitation in their
> addressing. This means that even computers with less than that 3G memory
> would get the performance hit. As much as I would want this to happen it
> is not feasible nor likely will be feasible to have such kernel as
> default. Just move into 64-bit Linux, it does run also every 32-bit
> application just fine. The time of running 32-bit distributions has been
> over for couple years already to be honest.
>
>
> ** Changed in: ubuntu
> Status: New => Invalid
>
> --
> HIGHMEM64G is not enabled in Ubuntu Desktop 32-bit
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/179025
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

Revision history for this message
john W (marcusjohn) wrote :

Unfortunately not everything works in the 64 bit world. I just reformatted my perfectly good 64 bit install of Ubuntu Hardy because SageTV will not run in 64 bits. So I downgraded to 32 bits Hardy. Now I find that something as simple as PAE is causing a lot of trouble. I would like to have the option of turning it on, so I can access the larger memory requirements of Video processing. I don't know if this is a bug or not, but I would like PAE.

John.

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