Re: [Xen-devel] Loopback images

[Ian P. <Ian...@cl...>]

> Another thing that I would really like to see is support for big memory (and 
> I'm not implying that Mark should do this too! :o)  ). Eventually of course 
> we'll be using 64 bit machines, but we will still have a number of dual Xeon 
> machines in our cluster and being limited by the amount of RAM we can use is 
> a potential concern (we'll be running MySQL databases on quite a proportion 
> of the VMs). At the moment I have 4GB in each node, but I'd like to be able 
> to raise that to 12GB. I know this is probably non-trivial, but I think it 
> would be widely used, especially by folks with large numbers of 32 bit 
> machines converted to use Xen. 

It wouldn't be particularly difficult to add support for x86_32
systems with more than 4GB, but would be a fair amount of work
and isn't very high on our priority list. The PAE36 3-level page
tables are all a bit of a hack, and we'd much rather put our
efforts into x86_64. 

I don't reckon there are that many x86 systems with more than 4GB
in use right now, and everything on the market will be x86_64
very soon anyhow.

Ian