Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?

Author Topic: [EN] Intel Atom N280 & PAE  (Read 6116 times)

Offline orinoco

  • User
  • Posts: 233
  • Bullshit artist
[EN] Intel Atom N280 & PAE
« on: 2017/02/05, 21:36:55 »
Hello,

I've got a thin client (HP T5745) equipped with an Intel Atom N280. It looks like this 32Bit-CPU supports PAE (cat /proc/cpuinfo told so). Because of this I put 8GB of memory into the thin client. The bios system summary shows this amount of memory. But with (even the latest) siduction i386 pae kernel only 3GB will be usable. Is a special kernel-parameter or a special kernel-config necessary to activate PAE for this kind of cpu?

Offline towo

  • Administrator
  • User
  • *****
  • Posts: 2.920
Re: Intel Atom N280 & PAE
« Reply #1 on: 2017/02/05, 21:42:46 »
Try the debian PAE Kernel.
I do not build pae-kernels anymore for siduction and we plan to kill 32bit at all.
Ich gehe nicht zum Karneval, ich verleihe nur manchmal mein Gesicht.

Offline musca

  • User
  • Posts: 725
  • sid, fly high!
Re: Intel Atom N280 & PAE
« Reply #2 on: 2017/02/05, 22:34:26 »
Did you enable the NX (No-Execute) mode in the BIOS?
It seems NX is related to PAE ...
„Es irrt der Mensch, solang er strebt.“  (Goethe, Faust)

Offline orinoco

  • User
  • Posts: 233
  • Bullshit artist
Re: Intel Atom N280 & PAE
« Reply #3 on: 2017/02/05, 22:49:22 »

Thanks for your answers.

@towo I did this yesterday with no success (Stretch RC2). Is there any way to check, if PAE is in use?


@musca It's a stripped AMI bios. No chance to enable NX.


Offline orinoco

  • User
  • Posts: 233
  • Bullshit artist
Re: Intel Atom N280 & PAE
« Reply #4 on: 2017/02/06, 00:09:36 »
Greped this maybe interesting from dmesg:

Code: [Select]
NX (Execute Disable) protection: active
initial memory mapped: [mem 0x00000000-0x17dfffff]
2114MB HIGHMEM available.
889MB LOWMEM available.
Reserving Intel graphics memory at 0x00000000bc000000-0x00000000bfffffff
Memory: 3020372K/3076344K available (5758K kernel code, 648K rwdata, 1700K rodata, 744K init, 520K bss, 55972K reserved, 0K cma-reserved, 2165384K highmem)

It looks like NX is set by default. But I can't see explicit if PAE is used and I don't have an alternative 32bit system available for a cross check.


Offline paxmark2

  • User
  • Posts: 85
Re: Intel Atom N280 & PAE
« Reply #5 on: 2017/02/07, 01:16:10 »
I have two N270's both running Debian testing, all N270 and N280 should work with a Debian pae kernel.


What I read from places is that the N280 has nx at the cpu level.  However some bios would enable and others did not have the capability to enable nx.  What I think would be the best way to check is to see if that Model is know to run Windows 8.  It appears that Windows 8 would not run unless nx was enabled. 

MODIFIED - addition
http://www.pkcarlisle.com/caniw78.html     Win 7 did not need nx  Win 8 does
Might be the easiest way to search out if the bios will enable no-execute  end mod.

I know for certain the max of my EEE901a for memory is 2GB and only by upgrading the kernel - this is a bios limitation I have read. 
« Last Edit: 2017/02/07, 01:22:40 by paxmark2 »

Offline musca

  • User
  • Posts: 725
  • sid, fly high!
Re: Intel Atom N280 & PAE
« Reply #6 on: 2017/02/07, 02:10:30 »
Maximal size of installed memory is a feature of the chipset. The Atom N280 doesn't support an integrated northbridge, so it depends on the chipset of the motherboard.
„Es irrt der Mensch, solang er strebt.“  (Goethe, Faust)