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

[Jamie Strandboge]

On Wed, 2011-11-09 at 14:43 -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.

The Geode LX AFAIK is certainly still in use. I know when I was looking
to buy an embedded system earlier this year, I came across quite a few
of these in new systems.

What about simply demoting the binary packages for this flavor, but
still build it? We wouldn't have to explicitly test it for SRUs/security
updates or deal with it with LTS backorts, but it would presumably still
be in ok shape since we would be actively testing the i686 pae kernel.
It could also provide a (albeit manual) fallback for people where the
pae kernel doesn't work on their system.

-- 
Jamie Strandboge             | http://www.canonical.com
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