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i386 PAE support (Patches)



Hi port-i386,

A while ago I took interest in native PAE on i386 - I've no idea whether
there are any plans for supporting it, but I've generated some patches
that successfully boot a system with PAE addressing.

The good news is that it works (at least for me), can address high
memory correctly, and seems stable. The bad news is that I might have
broken Xen with pmap changes, as it's not an area I have any experience
in. (A XEN3PAE_DOM0 kernel still boots though).

All the important changes (diff'd against NetBSD-5) are in:
http://www.netbsd.org/~jmorse/pae/corebits.diff

There're also a bunch of format string fixes for code that expects a
paddr_t to be a u_long. See http://www.netbsd.org/~jmorse/pae/notes.txt
for some more detail.

Hope someone finds this useful.

NB: I'm aware one immediate answer to this might be "Just install a 64
bit kernel/os to use high memory": My main aim doing this was to be able
to use the no-execute memory bit that's available with PAE.

-- 
Thanks,
Jeremy

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