Understanding i386 PAE

[Brad Waite]

Hi all, I've got some questions about i386 PAE. I was pointed towards
this list, but if another is more appropriate, just let me know.

I also know that i386 PAE is the ugly, red-headed step-child of FreeBSD.
Kindly keep the standard "why don't you use amd64" statements to a
minimum. My aim is to gain an accurate understanding of how things work
with my antiquated and lowly 32-bit hardware.

Based on my research, hardware w/PAE support can address up to 64G of
memory via a 36-bit addressing scheme. However, since an i386 process
can only address 32 bits, each process gets at most 4G of that 64G. In
my case, my Intel SE7501BR2, dual 2GHz Xeon server supports 8G max and I
want to use 6G, maximizing the kernel memory.

I understand that KVA_PAGES determines the amount of memory reserved for
the kernel, and therefore userland processes. But where does the kernel
fit into that 32-bit/4G limit?

My original understanding was that the kernel was a process, just like
userland ones, and could address 4G and therefore I could split my 6G
into 4G for the kernel and 2G for userland (KVA_PAGES = 2048).

I've been informed that PAE doesn't actually work that way. Instead, the
kernel-reserved memory is per-process and setting KVA_PAGES to 2048
means the kernel takes up all of the 4G of a process' addressable
memory, which obviously won't work.

Is the latter actually the case or is my original understanding correct?
Or is it somewhere in between?

Thanks!