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? Otherwise you will keep out a large amount of (admittedly casual) testers. And maybe until then the runtime handling emerges out of the blue and solves all issues. It's that improbable that it has to happen ;) -- Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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