Installed Fedora (FC8) and puzzled to how to get it to see more than 3GB Ram? I was! March 26th, 2008

    Well, just finished building a MySQL server for one of my customers, reasonable spec, Dell PowerEdge Server, 6GB Ram, 2 Intel Xeons, Fast Disks, should do the job great!  Well, it would if it could see more than 3GB Ram!

    After much googleing… and getting nowhere - here’s what i found:

     Install the PAE version of the Kernel:

    “yum install kernel-PAE”

    Cool. Now get Fedora to actually use that kernel on the next rebbot:

    “vi /etc/grub.conf”

    Look for the line “default=1″ Then change that to the corresponding kernel image you wanna load.  Im my case it was title Fedora (2.6.24.3-34.fc8PAE), it was the first in the list, so I changed the default to:

    “default=0″

    :wq!

    Then a quick “shutdown -r now”

    when its back up you can do a quick “cat /etc/meminfo” to see how much ram the os can now see and use. 

     On this server i was using Fedora Core 8 (FC8) and think this aplies to most newer linux distro’s.  If you find that there isn’t a “kernel-pae” package to install try “kernel-smp”, woked on one of my older Fedora Core 4 servers i just chucked some more ram into. Good luck!


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