Is 586 or PAE recommended with 2GB of memory?

[drago01]

On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 4:24 PM, Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 08, 2009 at 16:01:50 +0100,
>  drago01 <drago01 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 3:54 PM, Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> wrote:
>> > I upgraded to yesterdays rawhide and was given the 586 kernel by default.
>> > The CPUs are PAE compatible so I could use the PAE kernel instead.
>> > My question is, with just 2 GB of memory which is likely to run faster?
>> > And is getting NX a benefit worth having in Fedora?
>>
>> If your cpu supports PAE you should be running PAE.
>> Its not just for "> 4GB memory".
>
> Why? It looks like it should be slower because of an extra redirection on
> the page table. However, since 586 doesn't include cmov it may not be
> slower than 586.
> The other benefit it appears to provide is being able to mark pages
> as not executable. I don't know whether or not that actually buys anything
> when using Fedora.

You get support for using "real" NX (instead of the one emulated by
execshield), and you should see performance increases when using
visualization.