<div dir="ltr">Hello Tim, The only reason I see for keeping support of weird old CPUs is for people who have an old computer and they would like to linux-ize it. I'm not sure if the "old" of today are computers running with powerpc or non-PAE CPUs, so my original claim might be void. I think these kind of computers will probably won't be installed with Ubuntu at all, but X/Lubuntu might be a choice for them. As I understand the kernel of Ubuntu is shared between the 'sister-releases', am I right? Thanks, Amir <div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 11:43 PM, Tim Gardner <<a href="mailto:tim.gardner@canonical.com">tim.gardner@canonical.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> 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. If there is sufficient community demand (and support), I would be willing to sponsor the first non-PAE kernel upload to Universe. <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/Specs/PreciseKernelConfigReview" target="_blank">https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/Specs/PreciseKernelConfigReview</a> We'll be conducting a similar survey for powerpc. rtg P.S. For those of you that are totally confused by this email, PAE (Physical Address Extension) was an addition to 32 bit x86 CPUs that allowed them to address more then 4GB physical memory. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension</a> -- Tim Gardner <a href="mailto:tim.gardner@canonical.com" target="_blank">tim.gardner@canonical.com</a> -- ubuntu-devel mailing list <a href="mailto:ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com" target="_blank">ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com</a> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel" target="_blank">https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel</a> </blockquote></div> </div>