Kernel - PAE vs. non-PAE

José Matos jaomatos at gmail.com
Thu Jul 2 23:17:47 UTC 2009


On Wednesday 01 July 2009 02:27:01 Steven F. LeBrun wrote:
> When I installed F11 on my Toshiba laptop, it installed the PAE version
> of the kernel.  I am assuming that my laptop has a CPU with Physical
> Address Extensions functionality and can therefore address up to 64GB of
> memory.
>
> My laptop only has 3 GB installed.  Can anyone explain the pro's and
> con's of using the PAE version of Linux kernel instead of the non-PAE
> version?

Other than PAE don't forget that those kernels support natively NX stack 
protection, while for the i686 kernel that is done through software emulation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_bit

This is a FAQ and I suppose it (should be)/is stored somewhere. :-)
-- 
José Abílio




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