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: > > On Wed, May 17, 2006 at 02:07:59PM -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote: > > > As we move forward with Xen enablement, there's a desire for > > > being able to access more than 4 gigs of RAM on 32-bit Xen hosts. The > > > options for handling this are > > > 1) Another kernel. This is bad due to > > > a) we're running out of CD space already > > > b) keeping things matched up between the HV and the guest kernels > > > c) migration is worlds of pain with two types of kernels > > > 2) Switch the 32-bit xen kernels to require PAE. For most "current" > > > non-laptop hardware, this is a non-issue. It does mean that xen won't > > > work a lot of earlier PentiumM laptops > > > 3) Do nothing, tell people to use 64bit if they want more than 4 gigs of > > > RAM > > > 4) Make the PAE code handled at runtime. This is a pretty non-trivial > > > amount of work :) > > > > > > Given these, we're looking at going with #2 and thus only having Xen > > > work on PAE-capable hardware in the development tree. And we're > > > planning to try to execute this switchover the beginning of next week. > > > Note that this will not affect bare metal installs at all. > > > > > > Jeremy > > > > Judging from the feedback I would derive that > > > > o in later production environments usually hardware with PAE support > > will be used. > > > > o during development, though, people would like to test xen on their > > non-PAE hardware like their laptops. > > > > 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? > > 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 ...) -- Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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