Non-PAE kernel in 12.10

[Liam Proven]

On 23 February 2013 19:09, Debian at paulscrap.com <Debian at paulscrap.com> wrote:
> On 02/23/2013 01:51 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
>> Don't know if anyone remembers this, but I did it last night.
>>
>> The key is that the PAE kernel boots & runs just fine on non-PAE
>> processors *if* the CPU reports that it can do PAE. So someone's
>> devised a tiny little tool that lies and puts the string "pae" into
>> /proc/cpuinfo so that the PAE kernels believe your Pentium-M is
>> compliant.
>>
>
> Liam,
>
>         Do you have any more info or sources about this? Are there any
> tradeoffs or gotchas when doing this?  I ask because I have a Debian
> system with a Pentium M that boots fine off of a 686-pae kernel after
> upgrading it to Wheezy last night.  I *just* posted to the Debian-User
> list about that an hour or two ago.
>
>         Short version : I did install 486 kernel before reboot, but forgot to
> remove 686-pae kernel.  It defaulted to the pae one, and started up fine.
>
>         The interesting thing is that the cpu flags still doesn't have pae in it.

Very interesting!

I tried a vanilla Ubuntu 12.04 CD in this machine, but it wouldn't
start. There was, IIRC, an error message something like "This kernel
requires a CPU with the PAE feature" & then it hung. I used the
mini-ISO. It worked but not well - only Unity-2D works and performance
was poor. So I nuked it and reinstalled with Ubuntu.

I can't explain why yours booted, but I'd say relax and enjoy it!

-- 
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