[sllug-members]: Xen Question

[Lamont Peterson]

On Sunday 17 June 2007 08:15am, Thomas S Hatch wrote:
> Wow, I don't think I have pae, I have a Pentium M, here are my flags (and
> no pae flag!)

It probably doesn't have PAE.  Many people will tell you that every Intel 
processor since the Pentium Pro comes with PAE.  While it's true that it's 
*available* in every Intel processor family, not all chips actually get it.  
Most notably, almost all notbook destined Intel processors do not have it and 
it seems that some desktop chips are missing PAR, too.  Only the Xeon chips 
all have PAR, AFAIK.

> I think it might be time for new hardware! 

Or use another distro as the base.  SUSE provides both PAE  an non-PAE Xen 
kernels.  Another choice is to construct your own Xen kernels (in which case, 
I would *highly* recommend using the distro's kernel SRPM and "fixing" it 
up).  This can be kinda tough to do for Fedora/RHEL due to the shoehorning 
they've gone through to get a working Xen kernelal at all.

About a year ago, there was a lengthy discussion on the Fedora Developer 
and/or Fedora Xen lists (don't recall which, ATM) about making all future 
Fedora Xen kernels require PAE.  The main reason this was proposed (as I 
recall) was so that they could reduce the number of binary kernel packages to 
ship and maintain by 1 more (they also had and were cutting out other kernel 
packages at that time for that reason, "streamlining").  There were a large 
number of people on that thread opposed to it, as even the developers and sys 
admins who were working with Xen wanted it to work on their notebooks, but 
the kernel packagers won out and the rest, as they say, is history.

> flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8 mtrr pge mca cmov pat
> clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss tm pbe up est tm2

My notebook also mentions the "ht" flag, for example and it definately doesn't 
have hyperthreading.

> Thanks, I will get this blasted Xen working sometime!

You're best bets are:

1.  Use SUSE (or another distro who understands the value and need of 
providing non-PAE kernels).
2.  Build your own kernels.
3.  Get a different piece of hardware, preferably 64-bit (you can run an 
entirely 32-bit userspace with a 64-bit kernel if you absolutely must do so).
4.  Both 1 & 3 :) .

[snip]
-- 
Lamont Peterson <lamont at gurulabs.com>
Senior Instructor
Guru Labs, L.C. [ http://www.GuruLabs.com/ ]

NOTE:  All messages from this email address should be digitally signed with my
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