In an unprecedented annoucement on Greg Kroah-Hartman’s blog, he announced that the Linux kernel community would development free Linux kernel drivers for any company willing to simply give them some specs and (maybe) some hardware to development against. This is simply wonderful. Personally, I think this is the biggest announcement of 2007 for Linux. Sure, many people will say, “Well, that’s the way it has always been! If they would give us specs we would write the drivers.” Well, sorry, it hasn’t been happening. Sometimes, it takes an announcement like this to wake people up. When people install an operating system, they like their hardware to “just work”. This can get us there.

I have a server with 4gigs of RAM and because of the way memory is addressed, I need to utilize PAE support in my kernel. So, obviously I build a custom kernel for this box that uses PAE. Everything runs great and I normally have no issues at all with this setup. Until today that is.

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