On Wed, 2011-11-09 at 14:43 -0700, Tim Gardner wrote: > Per discussion at UDS the kernel team is proposing to drop the non-PAE > i386 flavour. The upgrade path for non-PAE users will be the PAE kernel. > Those CPUs that do not have i686 and PAE support will be orphaned. To > the best of my knowledge, these include Intel CPUs prior to Pentium II, > 400Mhz Pentium M, VIA C3, and Geode LX. As far as I know, there are no > laptop or desktop class CPUs being produced that do not meet these > minimum requirements.
Assuming that '400Mhz Pentium M' means the 'Banias' models with a 400 MHz FSB, this agrees with my understanding of PAE support. > Before I do something that is difficult to revert, I would like to hear > from the development community why we should continue to maintain a > kernel flavour that is (in my opinion) getting increasingly low > utilization. It is my feeling that an extremely high percentage of users > of the non-PAE kernel have a CPU that is PAE capable. I agree. In Debian testing/unstable we replaced the '686' flavour with '686-pae', with a check on installation to tell people if it won't work. There's been very little complaint about this, though of course we do maintain a non-PAE flavour. > If there is sufficient community demand (and support), I would be > willing to sponsor the first non-PAE kernel upload to Universe. [...] Coincidentally, none of those non-PAE processors support SMP (at least not in the standard way Linux supports). So if you have a specifically non-PAE flavour it's a useful optimisation to configure it as !SMP. Ben. -- Ben Hutchings The program is absolutely right; therefore, the computer must be wrong.
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