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Why we don't have 128-bit CPUs
(www.xda-developers.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Not just for 2 years, XP removed it in sp2.
And even when it supported it, many versions wouldn’t let you use it, or would let you “see” it but not use it.
For basically the life of XP.
And as I said, it could still be enabled with a boot switch.
It's not like all distros in 1999 had PAE enabled by default. You had to find a pae enabled kernel.
And Linux PAE has been buggy off and on for 20 years:
"It worked for a while, but the problem came back in 2022. "
https://flaterco.com/kb/PAE_slowdown.html