> 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.
Fake -PAE bypasses the check to stop dpkg installing a PAE kernel. But, even after that, the PAE kernel won't boot on a non-PAE CPU. PAE is not something that gets enabled (or disabled) at runtime, it is actually a replacement of functions in the kernel source (#ifdef .. #endif etc.), so if you have a PAE kernel it will not boot on non-PAE. So it makes no sense to ask people to check the address size on a CPU that has already booted a PAE kernel, since the fact that it successfully booted a PAE kernel means it must support PAE. (afaik - this is from the documentation, I do not have a non-Pentium-M non-PAE system to test with)
> 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.
Fake -PAE bypasses the check to stop dpkg installing a PAE kernel. But, even after that, the PAE kernel won't boot on a non-PAE CPU. PAE is not something that gets enabled (or disabled) at runtime, it is actually a replacement of functions in the kernel source (#ifdef .. #endif etc.), so if you have a PAE kernel it will not boot on non-PAE. So it makes no sense to ask people to check the address size on a CPU that has already booted a PAE kernel, since the fact that it successfully booted a PAE kernel means it must support PAE. (afaik - this is from the documentation, I do not have a non-Pentium-M non-PAE system to test with)