kernel-PAE hangs at boot -- did I do something wrong?

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2009-04-17 at 12:31 -0400, Will Woods wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-04-17 at 17:18 +0100, Mary Ellen Foster wrote:
> > 2009/4/17 John Summerfield <debian at herakles.homelinux.org>:
> > > Do you have an objection to running 64-bit Fedora? It obsoletes PAE, and
> > > your applications can see all available RAM, not just the 4 Gbytes 32-bit
> > > addresses give.
> > 
> > I've never tried 64-bit -- does it provide any concrete benefits? I've
> > always been a bit intimidated by all of the posts about multilib
> > craziness, and it didn't seem like it would be worth it ... :)
> 
> Yeah - as I understand it, identical code often runs faster when
> compiled for x86_64, just because i386 is just so starved for
> registers. 

In practice you're not likely to notice any difference in day-to-day
operation of most apps, but it certainly doesn't hurt.

> There are some other benefits too - for example, hardware NX protection
> is always available, so there's no weirdo software workarounds required
> to protect you from buffer overflows and the like.
> 
> The only place it gets tricky is when you start trying to deal with
> closed-source binaries, which are typically i386-only. But the most
> common example - Adobe Flash - is available in a native Linux x86_64
> binary these days.
> 
> And, if it really comes down to it, you can still run 32-bit binaries
> thanks to the wonder and magic[1] of multilib.
> 
> If your hardware's capable I really can't think of a good reason to
> avoid x86_64 anymore.

You can't run hv3! Not without manually installing a messy chain of i586
packages, anyway.

OK, that's not a very good reason =)

There used to be a lot of pain associated with running x86-64, which is
why people tended to steer clear of it, but these days it's really not a
big problem. And it's The Future, so we should probably encourage people
to do so. Don't kid yourself that it'll make everything twice as fast,
though, it doesn't.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net