I'm no Linus Torvalds fan, but his rant (and follow-up) on PAE explains why this is actually a terrible idea:
1) https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=76912&curposti... 2) https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=76912&curposti...
1) https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=76912&curposti... 2) https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=76912&curposti...
Anyways, Linus is being... Linus. He is of course right in some ways, from kernel point of view it does suck, when you can't map all of the caches and buffers simultaneously. But PAE is pretty good for a bunch of large processes.