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
I vaguely remember something for Windows XP that allowed me to run more than 4GB RAM on 32-bit...
I think the trick might be that nothing is stopping you from using more than one 32-bit integer to represent addresses and the kernel maps memory for processes in the first place, so as long as each process individually can work within the 32-bit address space, it's possible for the kernel to allocate that extra memory to processes.
I do suppose on some level the architecture, as in the CPU and/or motherboard need to support retrieving memory using more than 32 bits of address space, which would also be what somebody else replied, and seems to be available since 1999 on both AMD and Intel.
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.
Man I dread every time there’s a new kernel update on my Fedora machine. I just feel like something always breaks.
On openSUSE they have snapper snapshotting integrated into package management, so it automatically creates a snapshot before and after updates. And if something would go wrong you could easily select an old snappshot to boot from in the GRUB menu.
Setup Fedora woth Btrfs, Snapper and grub-btrfs
I followed this guide to setup snapper on fedora, not too much work involved.
I did initially try their guide on the above plus LUKS encryption but something was amiss in the boot process and I gave up on that rodeo for now.
Yeah I have Silverblue and I could roll back if it’s a horrible break. I just don’t want to be stuck not updating for weeks or months while the issues are worked out.
Does fedora not have an option to run an LTS kernel or something, like arch does? That might help, unless you really need certain things that are only in the newer kernels.
Not very easily. I’ve looked into it and decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. I only use immutable these days. NixOS makes using an LTS kernel really easily, but I could never get my piece of shit printer to work there. Works fine on Fedora.
Oh that's horrible.
Fedora shills need to be tarred and feathered instead of upvoted.
Nah I still love Fedora. Just wish they’d stick to the same kernel version per release. A little more stability could go a long ways.
Ah i see. I also use NixOS but i don't use any printers, so i don't know much about that either.
It really is a stupid reason. I should probably just replace the printer. I’m just too stubborn.
No personal experience with Fedora but if that'd been your experience why not shift to Arch (btw) or something similar. Been daily driving for 3~4 years, super stable and always on latest releases.
Had the same experience when I used Arch. It is way easier to use an LTS kernel there at least. But nah I’m all in on the immutable OS at this point. I used to use NixOS but could never get my piece of shit printer to work. Totally fine out of the box on Fedora.
Simply not true all the time especially if you tinker a bit with your machine. I've had Arch installs fail after huge updates more than once in my lifetime.
OP is talking about dreading major kernel updates because shit might break. I'm not talking about tinkering (though I'd argue against that point too, btrfs and timeshift exist).
Arch updates so often I barely even notice a kernel update; I'm certainly not dreading it.
Also side point, super huge updates on arch are normally an indication that you didn't perform a full system update in a while. If things are going to break it's when you dont perform regular system maintenance.
finally i can get a working wifi driver on opensuse aeon again
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