03-01-2016, 11:45 PM
Well, even though 1 or 2GB of DRAM fits easily into a 32-bit memory address space, on linux you can map files to memory regions, so an application can use more than 4GB of address space while still consuming less than the total DRAM. Consul and cassandra are two examples of such applications. And of course, you could have a swap partition > 4GB if you wanted (although even an SSD over USB2 probably wouldn't be fast enough to make paging large regions useful).