On 15.09.2007 18:27, fedorawiki-noreply(a)fedoraproject.org wrote:
You have subscribed to a wiki page or wiki category on "Fedora
Project Wiki" for change notification.
The following page has been changed by PaulFrields:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Beats/Kernel?action=diff&rev2=112&...
[...]
+ * The kernel-PAE, for use in 32-bit x86 systems with more
than 4GB of RAM, or with CPUs that have a NX (No eXecute) feature.
This kernel support both uniprocessor and multi-processor systems.
Configured sources are available in the `kernel-PAE-devel` package.
This reminded me of:
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit...
Quoting Patch description:
i386: divorce CONFIG_X86_PAE from CONFIG_HIGHMEM64G
PAE is useful for more than supporting more than 4GB RAM. It supports
expanded swapspace and NX executable protections. Some users may want NX
or expanded swapspace support without the overhead or instability of
highmem. For these reasons, the following patch divorces CONFIG_X86_PAE
from CONFIG_HIGHMEM64G.
Which brings me to the point why I'm writing this mail: should we enable
PAE by default after F8 is out and ship a HIGHMEM64G-Kernel instead on
x86-32? Then normal users on x86-32 can benefit from NX by default. Or
is that considered "not worth the trouble because we ship execshield
already"?
Further: Does PAE-by-default still make lots of machines unbootable (I
doubt that for newer machines, as some-well-known-other-os enables PAE
since its service pack 2 by default iirc)? If we suspect it still does:
could we fix that by some kind of automatic "if machine is newer than
${year}" check in the kernel?
Just wondering.
CU
knurd