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

[Jonathan Carter (highvoltage)]

Hi Tim

On 11-11-09 04:43 PM, 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.
> 
> 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. It is my feeling that an extremely high percentage of users
> of the non-PAE kernel have a CPU that is PAE capable.

This will really suck for many people who use those non-PAE capable CPUs
in thin clients, which would otherwise work more or less ok on 12.04. In
my dayjob we have several thousands of them out there, they're old
machines but they work well enough for the clients not to replace them yet.

> If there is sufficient community demand (and support), I would be
> willing to sponsor the first non-PAE kernel upload to Universe.

How does that work? Would there need to be a completely separate source
package for the non-PAE version so that it could go into universe? Would
a kernel in universe have the same security update requirements as the
kernel packages in main?

-Jonathan