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Many 32-bit computers have 32 physical address bits and are thus limited to 4 GiB (2 32 words) of memory. [3] [4] x86 processors prior to the Pentium Pro have 32 or fewer physical address bits; however, most x86 processors since the Pentium Pro, which was first sold in 1995, have the Physical Address Extension (PAE) mechanism, [5]: 445 which allows addressing up to 64 GiB (2 36 words) of memory.
Software limitations to usable physical RAM may be present. An operating system may only be designed to allocate a certain amount of memory, with upper address bits reserved to indicate designations such as I/O or supervisor mode or other security information. Or the operating system may rely on internal data structures with fixed limits for ...
SoftPerfect RAM Disk can access memory available to Windows, i.e. on 32-bit systems it is limited to the same 4 GB as the 32-bit Windows itself, otherwise for physical memory beyond 4 GB it must be installed on 64-bit Windows. Multiple RAM disks can be created, and these can optionally be made persistent by automatically saving contents to and ...
e820 is shorthand for the facility by which the BIOS of an x86-based computer system reports the memory map to the operating system or boot loader. [1] It is accessed via the int 15h call, by setting the AX register to value E820 in hexadecimal. It reports which memory address ranges are usable and which are reserved for use by the BIOS. [2]
Memory fragmentation is one of the most severe problems faced by system managers. [citation needed] Over time, it leads to degradation of system performance. Eventually, memory fragmentation may lead to complete loss of (application-usable) free memory. Memory fragmentation is a kernel programming level problem.
On May 2, 2017, Microsoft unveiled Windows 10 S (referred to in leaks as Windows 10 Cloud), a feature-limited edition of Windows 10 which was designed primarily for devices in the education market (competing, in particular, with ChromeOS netbooks), such as the Surface Laptop that Microsoft also unveiled at this time. The OS restricts software ...
An x86-64 processor acts identically to an IA-32 processor when running in real mode or protected mode, which are supported modes when the processor is not in long mode.. A bit in the CPUID extended attributes field informs programs in real or protected modes if the processor can go to long mode, which allows a program to detect an x86-64 processor.
For a warm boot, the BIOS will be located in the proper place in RAM and the northbridge will direct the reset vector call to the RAM. In earlier PC systems, before chipsets were standard, the BIOS ROM would be located at an address range that included the reset vector, and BIOS ran directly out of ROM.