On Tue, Jul 26, 2016, at 19:05, David Wright wrote: > > One issue though: I have a useful laptop that has a nifty 686 (AIUI) > Pentium M processor, but I have to run linux-image-3.16.0-4-586 on it > because it lacks the PAE. (It has SSE/SSE2.) Do you know whether > stretch will cater for non-PAE processors? Or is this no more than > a kernel issue which doesn't involve package builds, as appears to > be the case in jessie?
You have a Banias-class Pentium M. All Pentium Ms support PAE. But due to a microcode bug, the Banias-class Pentium Ms do not report their PAE capability in the output of the CPUID instruction. A *-686-pae kernel will run just fine on a Banias-class Pentium M, but you must supply the "forcepae" kernel boot parameter to get it to work. I have such a machine myself, so I know from experience. Note that stretch supports both *-686 and *-686-pae kernels. You don't necessarily *need* to run a PAE kernel. Some prefer to run a non-PAE kernel because it's easier on the memory requirements. But the processor must support the Pentium Pro instruction set, which all Pentium Ms do. -- .''`. Stephen Powell <zlinux...@fastmail.com> : :' : `. `'` `-
