Introducing the LPAE Split

To better support the wide variety of 32-bit ARM hardware in the wild, starting with Linux-libre version 6.6-gnu and moving forward, the 32-bit ARM (armhf) Linux-libre kernels will be split into two distinct flavors: one with LPAE support, and one without. LPAE stands for Large Physical Address Extension. On 32-bit ARM architectures, enabling LPAE in the kernel is needed to address more than 4GB of physical RAM and to support hardware virtualization (KVM). But older ARMv7 processors, such as the Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9, don't support this, and an LPAE-enabled kernel will fail to boot. Because it's impossible to have a single 32-bit kernel image that supports both at the same time, the builds are split into two. If you're unsure whether your current 32-bit ARM processor supports LPAE, you can easily check by looking at your CPU flags. Run this command in your terminal: grep --color=always -i lpae /proc/cpuinfo If it returns output, you'll see one or more lines listing your CPU…