Switch to PAE installer kernel/initrd by default on i386?
The CD team recently switched to including the 686-pae kernel flavour on
wheezy CD1 by default. I was wondering if maybe it would also be
possible to switch to the 686-pae flavour of the installer itself by
default? (currently this flavour is somewhat branded the "xen" flavour).
I'm not suggesting we drop the 486 flavour, as it is still required for
a minority of processors which don't support 686, so it would still need
to remain available on one of the other CDs and in a netboot flavour
etc.
Doing this would make things much easier for people wanting to install
inside a Xen PV domU domain, who currently have to ensure that they use
one of the multi-arch CDs (which many users inevitably fail to realise).
I think it would also enable Xen HVM domU's to use PV drivers (so-called
PVHVM) out of the box which would be pretty cool. Other than the loss of
support for pre-686 processors in the default images I'm not aware of
any other up/downsides to native users (I guess things like NX and >4G
RAM support are not so critical for the installer itself).
Ian.
--
Ian Campbell
Someone is speaking well of you.
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