linux-raspi 5.4 in Focal is the first kernel that supports Pi 4B which requires LPAE to be enabled for armhf. Since we currently don't support board-specific kernels but follow a one-kernel-fits-all strategy, the LPAE kernel is also used on Pi 3 and 2 boards. Back then, running an armhf LPAE kernel on a Pi 3/2 resulted in additional kernel memory consumption of ~70MB compared to arm64 and non-LPAE kernels. For that reason I decided to introduce a raspi-nolpae flavor which can be used on Pi 3 and 2 (only). That flavor was never officially announced nor installed automatically anywhere. A user has to install in manually. We never had any complaints about kernel memory consumption so never directed anybody at installing this flavor. Therefore I'm assuming it's not being used...
With this commit, the memory consumption of both the armhf raspi and raspi-nolpae flavor are pretty much on par and there is really no reason anymore to keep the raspi-nolpae flavor around. So let's get rid of it and introduce a transitional package that replaces installed raspi-nolpae packages with raspi packages.
linux-raspi 5.4 in Focal is the first kernel that supports Pi 4B which requires LPAE to be enabled for armhf. Since we currently don't support board-specific kernels but follow a one-kernel-fits-all strategy, the LPAE kernel is also used on Pi 3 and 2 boards. Back then, running an armhf LPAE kernel on a Pi 3/2 resulted in additional kernel memory consumption of ~70MB compared to arm64 and non-LPAE kernels. For that reason I decided to introduce a raspi-nolpae flavor which can be used on Pi 3 and 2 (only). That flavor was never officially announced nor installed automatically anywhere. A user has to install in manually. We never had any complaints about kernel memory consumption so never directed anybody at installing this flavor. Therefore I'm assuming it's not being used...
Turns out that the early 5.4 kernels were broken and incorrectly initialized a 64MB SWIOTLB buffer which is the reason for the above additional memory consumption. This was fixed here: https:/ /git.kernel. org/pub/ scm/linux/ kernel/ git/torvalds/ linux.git/ commit/ ?id=fcf044891c8 4e38fc90eb736b8 18781bccf94e38
With this commit, the memory consumption of both the armhf raspi and raspi-nolpae flavor are pretty much on par and there is really no reason anymore to keep the raspi-nolpae flavor around. So let's get rid of it and introduce a transitional package that replaces installed raspi-nolpae packages with raspi packages.