[Fedora-xen] Re: Heads-up: Requiring PAE for running Xen

[Jeremy Katz]

On Sat, 2006-05-20 at 17:26 +0200, Axel Thimm wrote:
> On Sat, May 20, 2006 at 09:47:17AM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
> > On Sat, 2006-05-20 at 16:14 +0200, Axel Thimm wrote:
> > > 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?
> > 
> > I don't think so.  I think you missed the "worlds of pain" part about
> > having two kernels.  It also becomes a resource issue.
> 
> Not within rawhide, or?

There's still just as much pain needed to do it just in the devel tree.
The only thing that removes is the CD space burden/

> > I think option 1 is simply too much burden.  So options 2 and 3 are
> > left.  It seems to come down to which is the "greater good".  Which
> > group is larger?  The ones that don't have PAE hardware, or the ones
> > that have machines with >= 4 gigs of RAM that are non-64bit.
> > 
> > Personally, I think option 2 is fine.  Of course, both my machines have
> > PAE :).
> 
> If personal bits matter, then I'd go for 3. I have no 32 bit machine
> with >= 4GB, but quite a few 64 bits ones. And the toy machines I
> would use to play with rawhide have no PAE. I guess whoever needs that
> much memory also needs something like x86_64' in-chip memory
> controller.
> 
> (the only systems I've recently seen with large memories running on 32
> bits were 64-bits platforms with Debian, due to Debian not supporting
> multilib ...)

Sadly, many people continue to run 32-bit distros even on brand new
hardware due to dependencies on "other stuff"[1]

Jeremy

[1] Think flash and the endless going on about that in 64bit browsers,
or on the even more painful side there are things which require kernel
modules :-/