Posted: Tue 19 Feb 2013, 14:07
That girl's face above is kind of what mine is looking like reading through this thread...
Having been part of the initial thread a couple of years ago that started this whole PAE for puppy thing, I have done some testing, research and have some experience and observations regarding PAE.
Firstly, despite Q5sys's assertions from what he has read, in my actual user experience, PAE does not have a 5% reduction in performance. Running through hardinfo tests (which aren't exactly definitive) the differences were more along the lines of 0.1%. Hardly enough to care about.
I have tested PAE on at least 6 PCs. It worked on 5. It didn't play nicely with my eeePC with an Atom processor. These things are / were really popular, and Puppy and puppy derivatives are often touted as being great for them. Think Jemimah's puppeee. Very popular computer that puppy won't boot on? Not cool. PAE works on my Celeron 600 something or other, AMD quad core, Pentium 4 something, AMD dual cores etc. For a PC that supports it, there is a theoretical difference, but it is not noticeable.
On my current main system, the Quad core AMD, I run Saluki. Initially I had 4gig of ram, running non PAE, so seeing about 3.2 and no swap. It's puppy after all, who needs all that ram. This was all well and good until I started using virtualbox to run windows whilst multitasking with other stuff, probably firefox and facebook. I ran out of ram, so bought 4 more gig, and changed to the PAE kernel for Saluki. On this PC with it's larger access to RAM provided by PAE, my stability and usability has increased. Virtualbox runs exactly the same as before, without the crashes. No recompilation required. And I can allocate 4gig of ram to windows in virtualbox, which it does need, coz its windows. I did have to compile the driver for nvidia as it didn't work with the PAE kernel. No problems there though.
This alludes to what I said in my previous post, and I think Atle highlighted it as well. When it comes to PAE, its best to know what you're doing and making an informed choice. For the girl in the story and pic who doesn't know what PAE even is, why bother? For the Puppy audience rejuvenating an old PC with less than 4gig of RAM, why bother? For the newer PC with more than 4gig of RAM, its awesome. For the newer PC with more than 4gig of RAM, 64bit should be awesomer.
In other threads dealing with this topic, I have said 64bit is the future, but, in the limited puppyland, 64bit is a tiny portion, with limited developers and limited support. PAE is a great intermediate step, to be able to use many of the 32bit PETs we have, without having to recompile or redesign for 64bit. The best thing for Puppy's future on the Modern desktop is to help Jamesbond et al working on 64bit to get past 32bit of all flavours.
Having been part of the initial thread a couple of years ago that started this whole PAE for puppy thing, I have done some testing, research and have some experience and observations regarding PAE.
Firstly, despite Q5sys's assertions from what he has read, in my actual user experience, PAE does not have a 5% reduction in performance. Running through hardinfo tests (which aren't exactly definitive) the differences were more along the lines of 0.1%. Hardly enough to care about.
I have tested PAE on at least 6 PCs. It worked on 5. It didn't play nicely with my eeePC with an Atom processor. These things are / were really popular, and Puppy and puppy derivatives are often touted as being great for them. Think Jemimah's puppeee. Very popular computer that puppy won't boot on? Not cool. PAE works on my Celeron 600 something or other, AMD quad core, Pentium 4 something, AMD dual cores etc. For a PC that supports it, there is a theoretical difference, but it is not noticeable.
On my current main system, the Quad core AMD, I run Saluki. Initially I had 4gig of ram, running non PAE, so seeing about 3.2 and no swap. It's puppy after all, who needs all that ram. This was all well and good until I started using virtualbox to run windows whilst multitasking with other stuff, probably firefox and facebook. I ran out of ram, so bought 4 more gig, and changed to the PAE kernel for Saluki. On this PC with it's larger access to RAM provided by PAE, my stability and usability has increased. Virtualbox runs exactly the same as before, without the crashes. No recompilation required. And I can allocate 4gig of ram to windows in virtualbox, which it does need, coz its windows. I did have to compile the driver for nvidia as it didn't work with the PAE kernel. No problems there though.
This alludes to what I said in my previous post, and I think Atle highlighted it as well. When it comes to PAE, its best to know what you're doing and making an informed choice. For the girl in the story and pic who doesn't know what PAE even is, why bother? For the Puppy audience rejuvenating an old PC with less than 4gig of RAM, why bother? For the newer PC with more than 4gig of RAM, its awesome. For the newer PC with more than 4gig of RAM, 64bit should be awesomer.
In other threads dealing with this topic, I have said 64bit is the future, but, in the limited puppyland, 64bit is a tiny portion, with limited developers and limited support. PAE is a great intermediate step, to be able to use many of the 32bit PETs we have, without having to recompile or redesign for 64bit. The best thing for Puppy's future on the Modern desktop is to help Jamesbond et al working on 64bit to get past 32bit of all flavours.