[kragen]

Maybe so, but I think it would have to be an amd64 CPU rather than an i386. Maybe you could do it inside of QEMU; does QEMU running on i386 permit emulating address spaces larger than 4GiB?

[anthk]

If you run PAE and enable ZRAM, You can probably handle it by booting a 32 bit OS under a 64 bit machine as you state.