Topic: SME-server 64bit

[Boris]

Are there any practical benefits from 64bit SME-server? Often 64Bit OS is used to overcome the 4GB RAM limits, but sme-x86 has supported more then 4GB of RAM for a long time with included kernels. In the very large enterprise deployments you find servers with huge amounts of memory and storage space where 32Bit server may not fit, but this is not a primary target market for SME. So what am I missing here? I understand the theoretical ability to manage very large address space, but in what practical scenario you would benefit from 64Bit?
I am not looking for a war 32Bit vs 64Bit, just for a pointers where in the typical deployment scenarios it is beneficial to use SME-64Bit instead of SME-32Bit.

[slords]

32-bit SME will only support 32GB of memory.  64-bit will take more memory to run the same program.  Other than that they are pretty much identical.

I've had the need to support 48GB+ of memory for quite a while.  Internally we have had a 64-bit of SME for a long time.  Look in the obsolete directory to see all the 64-bit versions.  With the release of 8.0 we decided to also release the 64-bit in case there were others out there that had the need of large memory systems.

Besides the memory issue there were (have since been fixed) issues with live migrating a 32-bit xen instance that was running on a 64-bit xen host.

-Shad

[compdoc]

If the 32bit version supported more than 4GB of ram then it must have done so using PAE, which wouldn't be as efficient or as fast.

And its my understanding that 64bit code runs more efficiently as well, making it run a little faster.

Centos, and its upstream provider have supported 64bits for some time, so why not?

I am in the process of upgrading an SME server today, and I thought about switching to 64bit. But since it runs in a Virtual Machine, I thought I would wait a bit and see if there are any reported problems. It will be easy to switch to 64bit later, and since its a VM there is no more than a couple minutes downtime.

[calisun]

32-bit SME will only support 32GB of memory.....

Is there anything I need to do to enable the support of memory over 4GIG?  My motherboard supports 16GIG's of RAM, I have 8gigs installed, but SME only shows 4gig

[CharlieBrady]

Is there anything I need to do to enable the support of memory over 4GIG?

You need kernel-PAE.

[compdoc]

>Is there anything I need to do to enable the support of memory over 4GIG?

Have you tried the new 64bit versions of SME? They are on the mirrors now...

Also, on some systems, there is a bios option dealing with how memory is handled. I cant remember the exact setting, but it might say something like 'memory hole' or remapping.

If you enter the bios, does the system see all of the ram? How about memtest86+, does that see it all?