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Hi, I´ve been doing some tests using a Q6600 P35 based hackintosh (EFI Vanilla) and 4gb ram, and I got the following results:

 

1.- Any task surpasing 2gb ram usage, shows as using 16 terabytes ram in the Activity Monitor

2.- Logic 8 completly crashes when the process uses about 3.2-3.3 gb (I don't know the exact number, due to #1 reason ;) )

3.- Kontatk 3 standalone shows a warning: no more memory pages avaible, continue? , when you reach about 3.2gb usage. (If you choose to continue it just crashes)

4.- No matter how many applications I launch, I always have a minimum of about 500mb free ram (using menumeter to monitor total free ram)

5.- Even rember, which is supossed to allocate til the very last byte of free ram, can´t use those 500mb

 

 

So, given that info I concluded, Tiger can't really use more than 3.5 gb ram in total, and no 32 bit application can´t use more than ~3.2 gb without completly crashing.

 

Am I wrong?

 

Apple insists in its web, a single process can use 4gb, but I´ve read about real macs with exactly the same behaviours

 

How does really manages ram Tiger and Leopard?

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5.- Even rember, which is supossed to allocate til the very last byte of free ram, can´t use those 500mb

My copy of Rember (0.3.3b) at most uses 2.5GB. Rember is just a front end for memtest (mine has memtest 4.0.4). There is probably a setting somewhere in the Rember package to adjust the upper limit.

 

I also have Memtest 4.2 which has used more than 7GB on my 8GB Hackintosh under 10.5.1. Tiger (10.4.11) always crashes/panics whenever I use about 3.25GB total. Memtest crashes immediately on Tiger. Running a couple copies or Rember (~5GB total) would run for a while and then crash.

 

At least one driver is causing the issue in Tiger, probably the IOATAFamily.kext. I might install Tiger on a USB drive and see if that solves my panics. Apple had G5s/Mac Pros with lots of memory running Tiger just fine, so I don't think the OS is the problem.

 

Panther with 8GB:

About_box_8GB.gif

x86 Tiger uses PAE mode which is 36-bit addressing and has been supported by nearly all x86 processors long before x64 even (Intel Pentium Pro). Researching this more it sounds like Tiger supports PAE mode only and Leopard is true 64-bit x64 addressing. Hmmm. Tiger and Leopard both have 32-bit only kernels using PAE for memory addressing. The kernel panics are being caused by the same issue that caused Microsoft to limit 32-bit Windows to <4GB after XP SP2--non PAE aware drivers.

 

GUI apps are 32-bit only under Tiger. A GUI application can launch a 64-bit command line process under Tiger (this is what Rember should be doing when it launches memtest.)

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