kernel-PAE and NX (No eXecute)

[Dave Jones]

On Mon, Nov 12, 2007 at 08:08:08PM +0100, Till Maas wrote:
 > Hiyas,
 > 
 > is still the kernel-PAE kernel needed in Fedora to use NX (No eXcute)?

Yes.  The NX bit lives in the pagetables defined in the PAE format.
There's no room in the non-PAE variant, so this won't change.
It's a hardware limitation that the kernel cannot work around.

If you install the non-PAE kernel, execshield will 'emulate' NX using
segmentation hacks.

 > I read 
 > that the 2.6.23 kernel supports NX without the need to activate 64G memory 
 > support?

not true.

 > If PAE for NX is not yet enabled in the normal kernel package, can 
 > we enable it and rename the -PAE package to e.g. HIGHMEM64 or similiar, to 
 > make it more obvious what it is useful for?

I see no reason to change the existing naming

	Dave

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