false wrote:I'm assembling new machine for apache/postgresql. I'm courious if grsecurity limits memory in any way (I think yes).
the only limitation i know of has to do with PaX/SEGMEXEC which limits the *virtual* address space of tasks to 1.5 GB, other than this there are no limits on *physical* memory.
you say that you plan to use a database of some 2 GB which obviously won't fit into the 1.5 GB address space (mind you, not even in the normal 3 GB unless you link your database app statically), so if you still want non-executable pages, you would have to use PAGEEXEC which will bring its own problems, in particular the performance impact would probably be too high (because the working set size of the database app would be way bigger than the 256k that the DTLB can map at once).
when you get your system up i'd like to see a /proc/<database app pid>/maps file output, this would help me determine whether extending SEGMEXEC to support a different data/code split is practical or not.