Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1897 mails)

[Larry Stotler <larrystotler@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 6:00 AM, Philipp Thomas <pth@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> Nope :) Once upon a time there were umpteen kernels, one for every type of
> disk subsystem and controller whoose support was compiled into the kernel.
> That changed when SuSE started to use an initrd to dynamically load the
> needed drivers.
> Ironically kernel-desktop revises that a bit because a selected part of the
> drivers are compiled into the kernel to speed up booting.

Back in 9.x IIRC, we had BigSMP for SMP systems(Still have my old
Precision 610 with dual Xeons....).

PAE was originally intended for 32bit x86 systems with more than 4GB
RAM.  PAE pages memory in and out of the lower 4GB space, kind of like
EMS used to(good old DOS......).  Now that the 64bit cpus have the
XD/NX bit at page table 63, you need PAE enabled to take advanatge of
it.  I've found with up to 11.2, that default, which doesn't(or at
least didn't) have PAE enabled works better on older 32bit chips that
don't have PAE.  Unfortunatelty, the installer looks for PAE and not
NX/XD when installing the kernel, so any chip with PAE(PPro onward,
Athlon onward) gets the desktop kernel.  It SHOULDn't seem to matter,
but I've found default is more stable on my P3 systems.......

Just my experience
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