Re: What Linux distribution to use?

[Stephen Powell <zlinuxman@fastmail.com>]

On Tue, Jul 26, 2016, at 19:05, David Wright wrote:
> 
> One issue though: I have a useful laptop that has a nifty 686 (AIUI)
> Pentium M processor, but I have to run linux-image-3.16.0-4-586 on it
> because it lacks the PAE.  (It has SSE/SSE2.)  Do you know whether
> stretch will cater for non-PAE processors?  Or is this no more than
> a kernel issue which doesn't involve package builds, as appears to
> be the case in jessie?

You have a Banias-class Pentium M.  All Pentium Ms support PAE.  But
due to a microcode bug, the Banias-class Pentium Ms do not report their
PAE capability in the output of the CPUID instruction.  A *-686-pae kernel
will run just fine on a Banias-class Pentium M, but you must supply the
"forcepae" kernel boot parameter to get it to work.  I have such a machine
myself, so I know from experience.

Note that stretch supports both *-686 and *-686-pae kernels.  You don't
necessarily *need* to run a PAE kernel.  Some prefer to run a non-PAE kernel
because it's easier on the memory requirements.  But the processor must
support the Pentium Pro instruction set, which all Pentium Ms do.

-- 
  .''`.     Stephen Powell    <zlinuxman@fastmail.com>
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