 | | | Newbie... | Newbie... 2003-05-17 - By Tony Nugent
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On Sat May 17 2003 at 16:25, "System" wrote:
> On redhat.com I have seen various updates for
> -athlon
> - i386
> - i586
> - i686
>
> Athlon and i386 I understand. But what does i586 and i686 systems are?
Hint: it describes the cpu architecture.
So the i586 refers to the original pentium chips, i686 to P-3 and
later processors (celeron, P4, etc). You'll soon see distros
compiled for the new 64bit amd opteron processors (in fact redhat
already have a downloadable beta distro available for it).
Only kernels, glibc and openssl are compiled cpu-optimised in redhat
releases (usually). The different versions of these binaries are
put into separate directories in the updates directory on the ftp
sites. (You didn't mention the noarch updates, they are important
too).
At install time, the anaconda installer is smart enough to detect
which kernel is appropriate for the cpu and uses that by default
version of the kernel by default. If you have a pentium-3 (celeron
etc), then it will use the i686 kernel and glibc packages.
If you are updating manually, you need to update the kernel with the
right arch version for the cpu that will be running with it. An
athlon can happily run all four versions of the kernel, but an i686
kernel will faulter (and problably not run at all) on an old i386.
You can rebuild the binaries of any .src.rpm package as optimised
for the athlon or i586/i686 chipsets by using the --target flag...
the compiler will happily build binaries optimised for the specified
architecture. You'll find the resulting binaries in a sub-directory
in /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/ (the subdir has a name corresponding to the
target, in just the same way that the updates are organised on the
ftp sites).
> Thank you,
>
> Tina..
(BTW, why don't you change your name in your message headers from
"System" to "Tina"?)
Cheers
Tony
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