On Tue 26 Jul 2016 at 21:17:40 (-0400), Stephen Powell wrote: > 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.
Thanks for that clear answer; I shall try that out. So I think that all my machines are in the clear. I guess there may be some of the specialist tinier distributions that might cater for machines even older than Pentium Pro that I assume Johann Klammer has. I'm not sure discussions of Desktop Environments, TDE or otherwise, would be relevant to such old machines. Cheers, David.
