4Gb on RHEL4 AS - PE1850 - should I use hugemem ?

[Sean Dilda]

Ricardo Stella wrote:
> Newbie question here...
> 
> I have a dual processor PE1850 which we upgraded from 2Gb to 4Gb.  This
> is running RHEL4 AS.
> 
> Should we now use the hugemem kernel or stay with the smp ?  What I read
> is that if you are running with 'more' than 4Gb, then you should use
> hugemem, but what about running 'AT' 4 Gb ?
>

That's for older versions of Red Hat.  If you do 'rpm -qi' on a modern 
kernel-hugemem package you'll see this:

Description :
This package includes an SMP version of the Linux kernel which
supports systems with 16 Gigabytes of memory or more.


The threshold has changed from 4GB to 16GB, so there's no need for you 
to worry about it.  However, if you had a 32-bit system with exactly 
16GB of memory (or more), I'd use the hugemem kernel.