Yes there is a workaround: use the vmalloc=xxx parameter to increase it to a value greater than 128MB. This will work in most cases where the reserved virtual s

Yes there is a workaround: use the vmalloc=xxx parameter to increase it to a value greater than 128MB. This will work in most cases where the reserved virtual space can almost always at least be increased up to 256MB. I had to use this parameter myself 7 years ago when I was running 50-100 QEMU VMs on a 32-bit host with 32GB RAM and PAE. The only cases where vmalloc=xxx won't solve your virtual address space is in exceedingly rare software/hardware configuration (more than 100+ QEMU VMs, more than probably about 4 Nvidia GPUs since they seem to use ~64MB each). So all in all, yes for 99%+ of users not running these rare configs, the 3GB/1GB split is just fine. Which is why Linux never changed this default. Microsoft has more problem with a 3GB/1GB split because their kernel is less space-optimized (mostly due to bad coding practices because too many Windows drivers/kernel developers assume that 2GB is available.) I maintain my opinion that 3GB/1GB is a better tradeoff.