Subject: Re: Pentium Pro
To: Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
From: Nathan J. Williams <nathanw@wasabisystems.com>
List: port-i386
Date: 04/28/2002 16:57:10
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org> writes:
> On Sun, Apr 28, 2002 at 11:44:53AM -0400, CMS wrote:
> >
> > Q. would a quad pentium pro work good with NetBSD,
> > or are there better machines, to use
>
> SMP isn't supported in NetBSD/i386 yet, exept in -current in a branch.
> You can try it on this machine. Otherwise just get a more powerfull but
> monoprocessor machine, and move devices (disks, DAT, etc) to this one.
For what it's worth, I have a quad-PPro system, and the i386 SMP
branch works okay. It's not a stunningly fast machine, but it's neat
to play with.
> > My machine
> > Quad Pentium Pro 200 / 1MB Cache each
> > 8GB Mem
>
> You'll only be able to use 4G with NetBSD, to my knowledge.
> BTW, how does 8G work with a PRo ? I though only xeon could handle
> more than 4G RAM.
No, the extension of the physical address space to 36 bits (PAE)
started with the Pentium Pro. We don't support on the i386, but it's
much closer than it used to be - the x86_64 pmap is very close to what
one would need for a PAE pmap on i386.
- Nathan