jxself.org

Introducing Non-PAE

Sun, 9 Mar 2014

I received a few requests to provide non-PAE kernels and I'm happy to announce that they are now available. In case you don't know PAE is a feature where 32-bit computers can access more than 4GB of memory. Most modern CPUs support this but older computers don't necessarily do and are incompatible with PAE-enabled kernels.

Some GNU/Linux distributions have stopped providing non-PAE kernels, essentially dropping support for those with these older computers. These people would typically need to compile their own custom kernels in order to disable PAE and potentially make their own custom installation media. This at least helps with the first part of that. I hope that this makes software freedom easier for those people by providing them with a non-PAE version of Linux-libre.

To determine if your CPU supports PAE run this command and check if to see if PAE is mentioned:

grep --color=always -i PAE /proc/cpuinfo

Instructions for using the repository can be found at http://jxself.org/linux-libre/.