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I've got a RHEL4 machine with 1TB of memory and have discovered that malloc and mmap refuse to allocate any memory above 512GB. Meanwhile, I don't seem to have a problem with RHEL5 machines. I'm presuming, then, that it's just a matter of kernel configuration. Does anyone know what controls the maximum process size (assuming a fixed page size)?

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RHEL4 is a few years old now... perhaps older versions cannot go this high – Simon Sheehan Dec 5 '12 at 20:34
Also 1TB is a lot of memory.. – Simon Sheehan Dec 5 '12 at 20:35
Yes it is but our domain requires it. And yes 1TB is a lot of memory. Actually, we'll probably need up to 4TB soon. – balor123 Dec 5 '12 at 20:36
Is all the memory recognized by the hardware (say in the BIOS)? Exactly which version/update level is your RHEL4 at? Which kernel are you using? – techie007 Dec 5 '12 at 20:46
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There are certain limits for code, data and stack segments. You can view them with ulimit -a and change them up to another limit. After that you need at least recompile the kernel, maybe some libs too. – ott-- Dec 5 '12 at 20:49
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migrated from superuser.com Dec 6 '12 at 16:31

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The initial port of Linux for amd64 only supported a 40-bit virtual address space, divided in 512GB for the process and 512GB for the kernel. Current versions support 48 bits of virtual address space, divided in 128TB/128TB. This last limitation is intrinsic in the current version of the amd64 architecture: there is simply no way to configure the MMU to make more bits significant. See How does Linux support more than 512GB of virtual address range in x86-64? for an explanation of the amd64 MMU, or the AMD64 Architecture Programmer's Manual (ยง5.1) for the full story.

I don't know exactly when this limitation changed, but your 2.6.9 kernel is really old. Red Hat publishes a table of features and limits for RHEL 3 through RHEL 6. The maximum per-process address space on RHEL4 is 512GB. RHEL5 will get you 2TB, but you might want to upgrade directly to RHEL6 which supports the full 128TB.

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From the doc, looks like it changed in 2.6.11. – balor123 Dec 6 '12 at 22:12

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