Comments on: data mining for NX bit

By: kees

kees — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 02:01:08 +0000

You are totally right! It looks like all the 595 PAE-but-no-NX are 32-bit (they lack the “address sizes” line in cpuinfo). And out of the 662 missing NX, 549 of those are 32-bit.

By: Yuhong Bao

Yuhong Bao — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 01:41:57 +0000

“hopefully these systems are running 32bit kernels to at least get the partial NX emulation”
Which most of them are by definition anyway, as they cannot run 64-bit at all. In fact, the only 64-bit processor I can think of that falls into that category is the Xeon Nocona D0-step from 2004, Intel’s first x86-64 processor that was pretty much limited only to servers.

By: anonon

anonon — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:54:02 +0000

Nice stats. Why do linux distros continue to think people run this stuff on 486′s? This train of thought has held back linux for a long time.

By: Brian Murray

Brian Murray — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:37:12 +0000

Thanks for the props man!

By: furicle

furicle — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 17:08:12 +0000

For kicks I ran this across our desktops – of 54 units, all had PAE, 4 have NX disabled in BIOS, 8 have nx enabled, rest aren’t nx capable. I made a note to enable it on desktop rebuilds checklist.

Is there any case of this causing issue in linux? I understand lots of common Windows software isn’t compatible (I believe IfranView is the posterchild here)

By: Florian Ludwig

Florian Ludwig — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 11:14:31 +0000

> 337 (4.64%) lacked PAE – I didn’t expect this to be so low; Ubuntu bug reporters must have relatively recent hardware overall

The first implementation of PAE was Intel’s Pention Pro, which was released in 1995. I don’t now if that’s what you call “relatively recent” but I think this one wouldn’t be able to run ubuntu anyway.

The only system I’ve seen so far not capable of PAE was a toshiba laptop with an intel core 2 duo – which does support PAE but toshiba crippled it somehow so neither pae nor 64bit would work.

By: kees

kees — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 20:20:43 +0000

Looks like stepping, cache, model name, etc. All the raw data is in the “tests” sub-directory of the check-bios-nx URL in the post, if anyone wants to study it.

By: Jef Spaleta

Jef Spaleta — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 20:07:01 +0000

7270 out of 7511 seems a bit high. It would be interesting to look more closely to see which lines are causing the uniqueness. For example if you group all your 7511 into groups by cpu family and model can you identify a field that is causing enhanced uniqueness? Perhaps stepping or the MHz field are causing uniqueness inside a cpu family model group?

-jef

By: ethana2

ethana2 — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:52:26 +0000

Just be sure that CoreBoot has proper defaults when it gets to the point where Ubuntu can automatically offer to install it.

Proprietary BIOSes all suck.