Heads-up: Requiring PAE for running Xen

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Am Montag, den 22.05.2006, 10:51 -0400 schrieb Jeremy Katz:
> On Sat, 2006-05-20 at 17:40 +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> > Am Samstag, den 20.05.2006, 16:14 +0200 schrieb Axel Thimm: 
> > > On Wed, May 17, 2006 at 02:07:59PM -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> > > > As we move forward with Xen enablement, there's a desire for
> > > > being able to access more than 4 gigs of RAM on 32-bit Xen hosts.  The
> > > > options for handling this are
> > > [...] 
> > > > 2) Switch the 32-bit xen kernels to require PAE.  For most "current"
> > > > non-laptop hardware, this is a non-issue.  It does mean that xen won't
> > > > work a lot of earlier PentiumM laptops
> > > [...]
> > > > Given these, we're looking at going with #2 and thus only having Xen
> > > > work on PAE-capable hardware in the development tree.  And we're
> > > > planning to try to execute this switchover the beginning of next week.
> > > > Note that this will not affect bare metal installs at all.
> > > [...] 
> > > So maybe rawhide should continue with both PAE and non-PAE kernels and
> > > decide on dropping the non-PAE when a release is about to be cut?
> > > Otherwise you will keep out a large amount of (admittedly casual)
> > > testers.
> > 
> > Well, I was always against kernel's in Fedora Extras (and I still am,
> > [mostly]). But having a Xen non-PAE kernel in Extras sounds like the
> > proper solution for the above problem. But having kernels in Extras
> > would only be okay for me if
> > - they are build with the same spec-file as the other kernels
> > - they are build on the same build system in the same step as the other
> > kernels
> > - they are moved to the proper Extras repo in the same moment as the
> > other kernels are pushed out
> 
> This involves huge fundamental changes to the build infrastructure that
> I'm really not sure are worth doing

Well, that could be nice for other aspects, too. E.g. moving some devel
packages and/or not that important sub-packages/language packs/whatever
to Extras sound like a good idea in my eyes in general (at least in the
long term). 

> > There are some technical problems that probably would need to be solved
> > before the above could be realized, but that should be possible if we
> > really want to.
> The other problem is the kernel binaries *have* to be with the
> installer, too -- otherwise, you can't install the guest as everything
> (HV + dom0 kernel + domU kernel) has to either be PAE or not.  Mixing
> and matching can't happen :(

Okay, that's a good argument :-/

CU
thl
-- 
Thorsten Leemhuis <fedora at leemhuis.info>