Switching Fedora to pae kernel by default?

[Neil Horman]

On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 07:31:12PM +0200, Avi Kivity wrote:
> Kyle McMartin wrote:
>> On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 11:23:26AM -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
>>   
>>> Dave Jones (davej at redhat.com) said:     
>>>> On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 03:49:20PM +0200, Avi Kivity wrote:
>>>>  > This probably comes up once in a while, thought I'd raise it again.
>>>>  >  > I'd like to suggest switching the default kernel to -PAE on 
>>>> machines  > that support it, for the following reasons:
>>>>  >  > - many machines have 4GB+ these days, even desktops
>>>>  > - NX is only available with -PAE, improves security
>>>>  > - kvm is significantly faster on AMD when PAE is selected (since 
>>>> we  > don't support NPT on non-PAE)
>>>>
>>>> What's needed to set this by default is changes in anaconda.
>>>> They have their own list at anaconda-list at redhat.com
>>>>       
>> Unless we keep the non-PAE i586 kernel around as a fallback, we're not
>> going to be able to boot on a whole raft of crappy i386 chips (original
>> Pentium M most notably...)
>
> I'm not suggesting dropping non-PAE.  Simply defaulting to PAE where  
> possible.
>
> Are Pentium Ms (really the memory that comes with them) actually capable  
> of running recent Fedoras?  I'm talking desktop, not  
> I'm-using-my-laptop-as-a-firewall-just-because-I-can.
>
Absolutely, I've got a Thinkpad T42 here that does just fine on fedora 10.
Unless of course, I try to load a PAE enabled kernel on it.

I've not looked into it at all, but this thread got me thinking, is there any
particular reason that we can't merge the pae and non-pae kernels using the same
alternatives approach we used to merge smp & up?

Neil

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