Heads-up: Requiring PAE for running Xen

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

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

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.

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