[Tails-dev] Shipping a 686-pae kernel

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Author: intrigeri
Date:  
To: tails-dev
Subject: [Tails-dev] Shipping a 686-pae kernel
Hi,

for various reasons (supporting big amounts of RAM, supporting >1 CPU
core, NX bit), we want to ship a 686-pae kernel in addition to the
current (486, non-SMP) one we already have, and make the bootloader
autodetect the most appropriate kernel depending on what the
CPU supports.

Work towards this started a while ago, but tremendous progress was
made these last days, thanks to a proof-of-concept by Ague that
allowed me to jump over one of the remaining blockers and bring the
feature into a state that I think is worth testing.

So, I just merged the feature/multikernel branch into experimental.

Quoting https://tails.boum.org/todo/nx_bit/ the next steps are:

1. heavily test on bare metal, especially to see if "liveusb-creator
crashes on amd64 kernel" affects systems running the 686-pae kernel
2. see if kexec'ing a -686-pae kernel (on hardware that supports it)
fixes "sdmem does not clear all memory"

Happy testing!

Cheers,
--
intrigeri
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