Bug#652469: Bug#652448: panic when booting on a machine with >= 4 GiB of RAM
El 17 de desembre de 2011 13:51, Arno Töll <debian@toell.net> ha escrit:
> On 17.12.2011 12:09, Robert Millan wrote:
>> - Add additional flavours (which ones? 686, 686-smp ... ? and then
>> which ones to provide with D-I?)
>
> That's what we're doing on Linux and that seems the best compromise.
I think on GNU/Linux many people want to use IA32 version even with
CPUs that support AMD mode, because they want IA32 userland for binary
compatibility with non-free software. I'm not sure how relevant is
this factor but it is unexistant on GNU/kFreeBSD, so I think this
should be accounted for when taking Linux as reference.
Another likely difference is that kFreeBSD in PAE mode has major
drawbacks (in particular we'd have to disable a bunch of drivers, see
sys/i386/conf/PAE and URL I pasted before). All in all, I have the
impression that using PAE would be unacceptable for the majority of
i686 users.
> On Linux there are many different kernel flavors where it is being worked
> on to reduce their amount. I propose -486 for older PCs and 686-pae for
> newer PCs. See [1] on more discussion about the minimal required processor.
>
> I am not sure if FreeBSD has drawbacks to use a SMP flavored kernel on a
> traditional legacy system with one CPU only. If yes there perhaps should
> be a -smp version for each too.
Good question. TBH I really dislike adding new flavours for PAE
unless SMP is merged. Then we'd only have to replace 686-smp with
686-pae instead of adding two new flavours.
I don't know if SMP option is really usable on uniprocessor hardware.
FWIW, I've tested -smp flavours for 8.3 and 9.0 on an uniprocessor VM
and both seem to work fine.
Maybe we should discuss this with FreeBSD? We could even propose them
to make SMP the default there.
> Regarding D-I I guess there is no easy way to tell in
> advance whether the system needs a PAE kernel or not,
Given that a PAE kernel has important drawbacks (like disabling a lot
of drivers), I'd rather leave it to the user to explicitly install
those kernels after a normal kFreeBSD is running.
--
Robert Millan
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