"You know the drill by now: another week, another -rc," began Linux creator, Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.26-rc4 kernel. "There's a lot of small stuff in here", he continued, "most people won't even notice. The most noticeable thing is for all you 32-bit x86 people who use PAE (enabled by the HIGHMEM64G config option) due to having too much memory in your machine - mprotect() was broken due to some of the PAT fix/cleanup patches, causing the NX bit to be not set correctly."

Linus described the fixed bug, "If you had PAE enabled _and_ a recent enough CPU to have NX, but not recent enough to be 64-bit (or you were just perverse and wanted to run a 32-bit kernel despite having a chip that could do 64-bit and enough memory that you _really_ should have used a 64-bit kernel), you'd get various random program failures with SIGSEGV. It ranged from X not starting up to apparently OpenOffice not working if it did."

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