I got a new laptop, a Dell D400. I want to swap my hard-drive from my old laptop into the new one, and did so… but then got an error stating that my CPU didn’t support PAE.
As far as I was aware I hadn’t actually installed a kernel with PAE enabled [as I always pick a real-time kernel for audio work]: but then read that lots of the newer distibutions are enabling PAE by default [which is what’s caused the problem].
Is there an easy way of disabling PAE in the existing kernel? Or would it be easier to downgrade to another version of OpenSUSE? I’m on 11.2.
That’s odd, because every Intel CPU Celeron and above has PAE. But since it won’t make a lot of difference whether you hava PAE if you don’t have more than 3GB memory, you can use a non-PAE kernel instead.
Are you sure that the message said that you have no PAE?
New used! I think this must be an early model of the D400, as the Pentium M CPU does not have PAE support.
I thought that when I downloaded kernel-rt from 11.2 OSS repo, that I’d selected one without PAE. In 11.0 you had a whole range of flavours: rt-pae, -rt, et al. So I assumed that by picking kernel-rt it would not have PAE. But it did.
Well Celerons as early as the 300 MHz models had PAE, but very few mobos at that time had the capacity for addressing that much memory that PAE was needed. It could well be that PAE is in the CPU but also needs chipset support and that was probably not provided on a laptop platform. If you boot the laptop up and do
Yes. But I thought I had. The kernel-rt that I installed on the HD when I had it in the Fujitsu-Siemens S6010 didn’t say it had PAE anywhere, but when I switched it into the D400 I got the error. So do I need to re-install, but on the D400 so that openSUSE picks up that it shouldn’t use PAE?
You could take the HD back to the Fujitsu and install a non-PAE kernel in addition to what’s already there so that you will have at least one that boots on the D400.
BTW there a reason why PAE is preferred when the hardware supports it, it also turns on the NX bit which helps give a bit more protection against misbehaving programs (read: malware). This may be why more kernels are built with PAE enabled now.
I tried that: but I think all the kernels offered by the OSS repo are PAE-enabled - even the default. I would have thought that the kernel would silently switch off PAE and allow the OS to boot though… but you have explained why it’s enabled by default, so thanks.
I think this must be an early model of the D400, as the Pentium M CPU does not have PAE support.