Dropping i386 non-PAE as a supported kernel flavour in Precise Pangolin

[Colin Watson]

On Wed, Nov 09, 2011 at 02:43:28PM -0700, Tim Gardner wrote:
> Per discussion at UDS the kernel team is proposing to drop the
> non-PAE i386 flavour. The upgrade path for non-PAE users will be the
> PAE kernel. Those CPUs that do not have i686 and PAE support will be
> orphaned. To the best of my knowledge, these include Intel CPUs
> prior to Pentium II, 400Mhz Pentium M, VIA C3, and Geode LX. As far
> as I know, there are no laptop or desktop class CPUs being produced
> that do not meet these minimum requirements.

Does KVM work properly with PAE kernels at the moment?  I've had trouble
with it within the last six months, and when running server
installations I've had to tweak them on the fly to install the generic
kernel in order that I could boot the installed system.

> Before I do something that is difficult to revert, I would like to
> hear from the development community why we should continue to
> maintain a kernel flavour that is (in my opinion) getting
> increasingly low utilization.

I'd have thought we needed data here?  I'm worried about dropping the
kernel that's been the default during the installer for some time, in
one step.  If we want to switch the installer to generic-pae and then
drop the non-PAE kernel in the next cycle if that works out well, I'd be
happier with that approach; that gives us a much more graceful fallback
plan in the event that our opinions are mistaken.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]