If I understand correctly it is impossible to address directly more than 4GB on i386 machines. Linux does allow to access more than 4Gb (it can map different parts of 64Gb RAM into 4GB address space) but it requires applications to be written in special way to use more than 4GB. AFAIK Perl doesn't have such support.

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Ilya Martynov (http://martynov.org/)