Bug#666017: linux-image-3.2.0-0.bpo.2-686-pae crashes during or after initial ramdisk on alix6e2 hardware
On Thu, 29 Mar 2012 at 13:30:54 +0200, Jelle de Jong wrote:
> When will there be a non pea 3.x kernel like with the 2.6 kernel
> available in Debian?
>From the kernel changelog:
* [i386] Rename '686-bigmem' flavour to '686-pae'; remove '686' flavour.
For 686-class systems without PAE, the '486' flavour is more efficient
than the '686' flavour due to optimisation for uniprocessor systems.
So you should use the -486 flavour on non-PAE hardware. Larger numbers
aren't necessarily better :-)
Perhaps the linux-image-686 transitional package should depend on
linux-image-486 (the conservative/safe/lowest-common-denominator choice).
On the other hand, linux-image-686-pae (the former "bigmem" version) is
more appropriate for most mainstream CPUs (although not for unusual CPUs like
your Geode), which is presumably the reason why automatic migration
from -686 is to that one.
The kernel team's advice on the appropriate new kernel for various CPUs
should probably go in the wheezy release notes, particularly if cases
like this exist.
S
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