Monday, September 08, 2008

OpenBSD cannot allocate more than 1Gb of RAM per process

It's 2008, and OpenBSD has a limit of 1Gb of RAM per process, even on 64-bit architectures.

This has been discussed many times over the years, and apparently the OpenBSD developers don't consider fixing this to be a priority, it has gone neglected for 4 years.

Pretty sad, really. I guess OpenBSD is great as a router on a 486, but for workstation or server use I recommend looking into NetBSD, FreeBSD or Linux instead.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I believe that for AMD64 -current, OpenBSD can now allocate up to 8 gb.RAM per process.

http://www.openbsd.org/plus44.html

Make amd64 machines be able to use more than 4G ram, and crank the MAXDSIZ to allow allocations/mmap() up to 8G.

Anonymous said...

Yes, looks like starting with OpenBSD 4.4, 8gb is the new per process limit on amd64.

Refer to http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sys/arch/amd64/include/vmparam.h