How do I disable PAE in RedHat WS3 ?

[Urte Fuerst]

Dear list,

we try to run an ancient version of vmware workstation (3.2) on one of
our RedHat WS3 boxes. After patching the vmware RPM package itself with
the latest vmware-any-any-patch, vmware tries to start with an already
existing installation. The hint we get then just before vmware decides to
close itself is, that the kernel we run has PAE enabled which keeps vmware
form working. The advice is that we should disable PAE in the kernel and
then try again.

The machine is a DELL Precision 2 processor  machine with 2GB of RAM. The
kernel version used is 2.4.21-32.0.1.EL. Looking in /proc/cpuinfo I see
that the PAE flags is set for both CPUs.

Some googling for this problem led us to giving vmware a try with the single
processor kernel started. This works, but of course gives a rather poor
overall performance of the system.

Can anybody please give me advice or point me to some good URL on how to
disable PAE support. My first thought was that this could be controlled
by some linux kernel startup option or maybe some smart command with the
/proc filesystem. Or do I really have to recompile the kernel? And if so:
what should I take care of and how do I preserve the standard redhat kernel
settings?

Any help would be appreciated, best regards from
Urte
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Urte Fuerst (IT-Manager)		German Aerospace Center DLR
Phone:  +49 (0)551 709 2432		Institute of Aeroelasticity
Fax:	+49 (0)551 709 2862		      Bunsenstrasse 10
E-mail: Urte.Fuerst at dlr.de		      37073 Goettingen

All wiyht. Rho sritched mg kegtops awound?