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1b1ed1a
(Get the code!)
The affected Pentium-M CPUs of these not so old Laptops all have phyical address space of 36 bits but for some reason Intel decided to not set the PAE flag (maybe its a bug in these series of CPU itself?) These were very popular CPUs at that time and they were built into a lot of Laptops, including many of the legendary ThinkPad models of that time, many of which are still in use today.
I can confirm that the PAE-Kernel will boot and run on these machines without any problems.
There are currently 2 Problems that make it extremely hard for people to use these kernels:
(1) the syslinux bootloader will refuse to boot from the install CD (although it could if it would at least try)
(2) the install scripts in the kernel .deb packages will simply grep -q ' pae ' /proc/cpuinfo and fail with error
The problem in (2) can be hacked around by the desperate user by simply bind-mounting a faked /proc/cpuinfo that contains this flag and then one can happily upgrade to 12.10 and install and use these new pae kernels without the slightest problem. It should be fixed by making the check in the install script in these kernel .deb packages more elaborate, maybe instead of grepping for pae it should grep for "36 bits physical" or these few very popular CPUs should simply be whitelisted.
The problem in (1) should be fixed in the way syslinux detects this (maybe counting the physical address bits instead of looking for the flag or simply whitelisting these few CPUs that actually have PAE and just not announce it in their flags would be a good idea?)
It wouldn't be such a problem if it were only old and exotic hardware but this bug also affects all the popular ThinkPads that are not so old and still in use today! These devices are for example still used today in the international space station (ISS) (they actually are the *only* Laptops officially certified for space travel and Ubuntu does not want to support them anymore) Richard Stallman (GNU) has been seen with ThinkPads on multiple occasions and even Shuttleworth (Canonical) himself has been photographed on board of the ISS using a ThinkPad. You cannot simply ignore this entire class of wonderful and useful Devices.
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