Comment 180 for bug 930447

On 2013-05-19 14:15, Chris Bainbridge wrote:
> sudodus, your description around the 36-bit physical addressing seems a
> little bit confused: "If you don't get 36 bits with a PAE kernel, your
> CPU has no PAE capability." - the Linux documentation states that if you
> can boot a PAE kernel, then your CPU has PAE. If you don't have PAE,
> then the kernel won't even boot.
>
> If you think that there are some non-PAE Pentium M models (which I have
> not seen reports of anywhere) and want to identify them then report the
> family, model and stepping, you can see these in dmesg ("CPU:" line)
> But at the moment I suspect every Pentium M can do PAE (have you seen
> any reports otherwise?)
>
You are probably right about that, but I'm not sure about the oldest
versions of Pentium M and Celeron M. The reason why I want people to
check the address size is the we are working around the check, that
should make it impossible to boot a non-pae CPU with a pae kernel.

I also want to warn people with old non-pae CPUs (that are not Pentium M
or Celeron M), that fake-PAE will not help their pae kernels to work.

     -o-

No, I have not seen any such reports, 'just trying to play safe'.