I'm not a distro developer. But, just a couple of notes that might help understanding.... I could put it in the build instead of the pae kernel. ...
PAE has been around since 1995. It is NOT anything new, nor is it known to have any negative impact on its use when the h/w support is built-in.
There are ONLY a handful of PCs that were built without PAE. These were vendor attempts to limit the growth and use of their PCs; thereby rendering the owner(s) to buy new should you had stopped using their Windows. This was NOT widespread as the mass-majority of all 32bit PCs came with PAE built-into the processor.
In 2006 the Industry took off on the Microsoft model and began building PCs which were capable of being physically expanded beyond 4GB of RAM.
Today, 4-6-8GB configs are sold in stores everywhere. Further geeks have expanded their older PCs to typically more that 4GB around the world.
PAE, says (in so many words) "if you have a PC, I, PAE, will insure the 32bit PAE enabled OS sees it no matter how much RAM you have in your PC."
This is why you have seen Mageia-PUP, and Precise-PUP, RACY, Slacko, and others implement PAE distros.
One more IMPORTANT (at least to me) bit of trivia. Some of the distro developers of last 2 years have been indicated a PC platform spec that they have designed their distros to work on. They have all indicated that their distros "might" work on PCs of lessor means, but, they are at least providing a recommendation (probably because those are the PC they built and tested on). You may want to let us know what platforms you are targeting your Precise toward.
PAE is really a good thing as we do NOT have to change anything in Puppy OS not matter how much RAM we add as our system grows. Other implementations stop between 3.5-4GB because the distro developers do not want you to use more than that.
Hope this makes clear what PAE is and what we were able to find out through testing in this Puppy community.
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