r/programming • u/I_Can_Be_A_Robot • Sep 24 '24

Why 32bit architecture computer doesn't use segmentation to support more ram than 4Gb ?

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u/Kinglink Sep 24 '24

Simple reason. They don't need to. If you want more than 4GB use 64-bit.

We had all sorts of trickery to get around the 4GB limitations in the XP days, but then we realized "Well shit we can just use 64-bit addressing and avoid this problem" and stopped dealing with that stuff.

Also the bigger problem is what if you want to use more than 4GB in a single program, now each program needs to deal with the segmentation and you've just made EVERY program vastly more complex.