From owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Sun Dec 14 17:48:06 2014 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [8.8.178.115]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher AECDH-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 29B5DA10 for ; Sun, 14 Dec 2014 17:48:06 +0000 (UTC) Received: from mho-02-ewr.mailhop.org (mho-02-ewr.mailhop.org [204.13.248.72]) (using TLSv1 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (Client did not present a certificate) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 007B99AD for ; Sun, 14 Dec 2014 17:48:05 +0000 (UTC) Received: from [73.34.117.227] (helo=ilsoft.org) by mho-02-ewr.mailhop.org with esmtpsa (TLSv1:AES256-SHA:256) (Exim 4.72) (envelope-from ) id 1Y0DGx-000Aon-6c for freebsd-stable@freebsd.org; Sun, 14 Dec 2014 17:47:59 +0000 Received: from revolution.hippie.lan (revolution.hippie.lan [172.22.42.240]) by ilsoft.org (8.14.9/8.14.9) with ESMTP id sBEHlwuR023094 for ; Sun, 14 Dec 2014 10:47:58 -0700 (MST) (envelope-from ian@freebsd.org) X-Mail-Handler: Dyn Standard SMTP by Dyn X-Originating-IP: 73.34.117.227 X-Report-Abuse-To: abuse@dyndns.com (see http://www.dyndns.com/services/sendlabs/outbound_abuse.html for abuse reporting information) X-MHO-User: U2FsdGVkX1/6r9xyLFqAnxuSikI8yeD9 Message-ID: <1418579278.2026.9.camel@freebsd.org> Subject: i386 PAE kernel works fine on 10-stable From: Ian Lepore To: FreeBSD Stable Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2014 10:47:58 -0700 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" X-Mailer: Evolution 3.12.8 FreeBSD GNOME Team Port Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-BeenThere: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.18-1 Precedence: list List-Id: Production branch of FreeBSD source code List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2014 17:48:06 -0000 This is an out of the blue FYI post to let people know that despite all the misinformation you'll run across if you search for information on FreeBSD PAE support, it (still) works just fine. I've been using it (for reasons related to our build system and products at $work) since 2006, and I can say unequivocally that it works fine on 6.x, 8.x, and now 10.x (and presumably on the odd-numbered releases too but I've never tried those). In my most recent testing with 10-stable, I found it was compatible with drm2 and radeonkms drivers and I was able to run Xorg and gnome just fine. All my devices, and apps, and even the linuxulator worked just fine. One thing that changed somewhere between 8.4 and 10.1 is that I had to add a kernel tuning option to my kernel config: option KVA_PAGES=768 # Default is 512 I suspect that the most frequent use of PAE is on laptops that have 4gb and the default tuning is adequate for that. My desktop machine has 12gb and I needed to bump up that value to avoid errors related to being unable to create new kernel stacks. -- Ian