Re: Dropping 686 non-pae kernel
On Monday 14 February 2011, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-02-14 at 11:23 +0100, Bastian Blank wrote:
> > Hi folks
> >
> > I'd like to drop the i686 non-pae kernel. Currently we have sometimes
> > -686 with PAE; only the normal kernel is without PAE. I'd like to get
> > rid of this problem. Also this enables the use of the NX bit if supported
> > by the CPU.
> >
> > There are some i686 processors without PAE support. This are some of the
> > Pentium M (all of the Banias line and some of the Dothan line) and the
> > Via C3 Nehemiah. All of them are released 2005 and earlier.
>
> Also Geode LX.
There are also the Vortex86SX based boards which are showing up in a variety
of little embedded boards. I am not sure these will run with -586 (but I may
be wrong).
There are many embedded boards with Geode SC1100 boards out there as well,
PCEngines WRAP boards, and one of the Microtik boards. The Geode LX appears
in places like the PCEngines Alix boards which are very much still
current. Although some of these are are no longer manufacturered
they are still in the field. I have some 8 year old boards still doing
sterling service, and I would not like to be blocked from using current
software. In fact I have just upgrade one (an old Wrap card) to Squeeze
because it was easier to do that and then install the extra package I needed
that to search through the archives looking for old copied of the package
that were current at the time I build the system image.
David
>
> Are there any changes we could/should make to the 486 flavour that would
> make it perform better on 686-class processors? Should we consider also
> dropping 486 support and making it a 586 flavour with corresponding
> optimisations?
>
> > There are several possibilities to do this:
> >
> > * Change name of meta-package:
> > - Breaks nothing
> > - Needs manual intervention by anyone using it
> >
> > * Don't change the name:
> > - Breaks some systems
> > - No manual intervention by the rest
>
> Rename 686-bigmem to 686. Keep the 686-bigmem metapackage as a dummy
> package depending on the 686 metapackage (for one release). When the
> 686 metapackage is upgraded on a system that doesn't support PAE,
> display a warning with debconf.
>
> Ben.
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