On Mon, 17 Oct 2011, Stephan Wiesand wrote:

> On Oct 17, 2011, at 18:20 , Yasha Karant wrote:
>
> Yes: The 32-bit kernel will leave 25% of your 4 GB RAM unused, I believe. And all processes will be confined to 3 GB of address space (even if purely virtual). Increasingly, new features are only made available by TUV for the 64-bit flavour (KVM, xfs, samba3x on SL5, pNFS). Since the Java and Flash plugins are now available as 64-bit builds, much of the hassle with running 64-bit SL is now history. x86-64 has a future, ia32 IMHO hasn't (x32 seems interesting but will take a while to arrive and will use a 64-bit kernel). The extended register set and faster PC-relative addressing are not available to ia32 applications. A 500GB disk is plenty for installing the .i686 packages alongside the 64-bit ones.
>

32-bit kernel can address more than 4GB of memory if the kernel uses PAE mode,
physical address extension, up to 40-bit.


Mike