Is 586 or PAE recommended with 2GB of memory?

Bruno Wolff III bruno at wolff.to
Sun Feb 8 15:24:34 UTC 2009


On Sun, Feb 08, 2009 at 16:01:50 +0100,
  drago01 <drago01 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 3:54 PM, Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> wrote:
> > I upgraded to yesterdays rawhide and was given the 586 kernel by default.
> > The CPUs are PAE compatible so I could use the PAE kernel instead.
> > My question is, with just 2 GB of memory which is likely to run faster?
> > And is getting NX a benefit worth having in Fedora?
> 
> If your cpu supports PAE you should be running PAE.
> Its not just for "> 4GB memory".

Why? It looks like it should be slower because of an extra redirection on
the page table. However, since 586 doesn't include cmov it may not be
slower than 586.
The other benefit it appears to provide is being able to mark pages
as not executable. I don't know whether or not that actually buys anything
when using Fedora.




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