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The 2 GB limit refers to a physical memory barrier for a process running on a 32-bit operating system, which can only use a maximum of 2 GB of memory. [1] The problem mainly affects 32-bit versions of operating systems like Microsoft Windows and Linux, although some variants of the latter can overcome this barrier. [2]
File size. File size is a measure of how much data a computer file contains or, alternately, how much storage it consumes. Typically, file size is expressed in units of measurement based on the byte. By convention, file size units use either a metric prefix (as in megabyte and gigabyte) or a binary prefix (as in mebibyte and gibibyte).
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.
The number 4,294,967,295, equivalent to the hexadecimal value FFFF,FFFF16, is the maximum value for a 32-bit unsigned integer in computing. [6] It is therefore the maximum value for a variable declared as an unsigned integer (usually indicated by the unsigned codeword) in many programming languages running on modern computers.
A 32-bit register can store 2 32 different values. The range of integer values that can be stored in 32 bits depends on the integer representation used. With the two most common representations, the range is 0 through 4,294,967,295 (2 32 − 1) for representation as an binary number, and −2,147,483,648 (−2 31) through 2,147,483,647 (2 31 − 1) for representation as two's complement.
Address Windowing Extensions (AWE) is a conceptually similar feature in Microsoft Windows, used to enable 32-bit applications to access more memory than the 2–4GB that can fit in a 32-bit address space. Although still supported by current versions of Windows, its use has been superseded by 64-bit applications, which can access >4GB of memory ...
Memory paging. In computer operating systems, memory paging (or swapping on some Unix-like systems) is a memory management scheme by which a computer stores and retrieves data from secondary storage [a] for use in main memory. [citation needed] In this scheme, the operating system retrieves data from secondary storage in same-size blocks called ...
A memory management unit (MMU), sometimes called paged memory management unit (PMMU), [1] is a computer hardware unit that examines all memory references on the memory bus, translating these requests, known as virtual memory addresses, into physical addresses in main memory. In modern systems, programs generally have addresses that access the ...