I have a machine running CentOS 4 32-bit with 12 gigs of RAM.
If I run the free command I see:
# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 12409180 2227676 10181504 0 48544 961296
-/+ buffers/cache: 1217836 11191344
Swap: 4192956 0 4192956
If I run top I see that we have 12 gigs of RAM.
The question is I am running kernel 2.6.9-78.0.22.ELsmp and I was wondering if the system is able to use more than 4 gigs of RAM. I have seen many things saying you need to have this kernel version (PAE) or you need the smp kernel version. I understand in a 32-bit OS that the RAM is limited per process, but I was wondering if the OS can address more than 4 gigs for application use (as in 5 applications using 2 gigs of ram each).