Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
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.
Yes, it does still tend to break machines, especially laptops and older
machines (we run into this a lot with Xen, since we only ship a PAE
variant there). Unfortunately, PAE is a compile time option, not
something that can (currently) be turned on or off at runtime. It would
be nice to make it a runtime option (IIRC, OpenSolaris does this), but I
don't know if it is worth the effort given that 32-bit should be
becoming less and less common.
Chris Lalancette