[Qt-interest] Is mingw32-g++ that comes with Qt 4.6.0 RC1 compiled as LARGEADDRESSAWARE?

[Oliver.Knoll at comit.ch]

Garth Dahlstrom wrote on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 6:41 AM:

> ... I'm wondering if
> mingw32-gcc was built as being LARGEADDRESSAWARE, so that it would be
> able to access more then 2GB of RAM if I build a bigger box.

Although I am not familiar with this issue (but I am aware of the 2 GB vs 4 GB vs "actually usable" memory limits on Windows 32bit systems, as mentioned in the link you have posted) it seems that /LARGEADDRESSAWARE (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wz223b1z.aspx ) is a MS linker specific flag.

So the next question I would ask is: is mingw32-gcc actually compiled/linked with the MS toolchain? Or does it compile itself? In other words: is there actually such a flag for the GNU linker (I think it is called 'ld', no?). I don't know myself...

Then another issue I am pretty sure you are aware of is that by default a given process on Win32 can only use up to 2 GB, even if Windows (32bit) is actually capable to cope with up to "close to 4 GB" (depending on the hardware some extra MB are "cut off", so usually Windows only sees about 3.5 GB). That said, you need to explicitly turn on some switch (Windows boot.ini?) so that a given process can actually address up to 3 GB (and I think the above-mentioned /LARGEADDRESSAWARE refers exactly to that, so that the process "realises" that this "boot.ini" switch as been enabled).


Cheers, Oliver
-- 
Oliver Knoll
Dipl. Informatik-Ing. ETH
COMIT AG - ++41 79 520 95 22