On Tue, Jun 21, 2005 at 01:46:36AM +0000, Bryan J. Smith <b.j.smith@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Right ... but in a software capacity we are also talking about pentium,
> > pentium mmx, cyrix i686, amd k6, via c3 that use i586 packages.
>
> You want to use i686 for AMD K6, Cyrix M2 and Via C3.
I read a web page that suggested that in some cases software built for
"i686" would not in fact work on Via C3 processors (this is near & dear
to my heart since i just bought a motherboard based on one). The C3 is
definitely a modern platform - it's not fast by modern standards but it
works well enough for many applications and its heat/power requirements
are wonderful (circa 10 watts).
The discussion suggested that the "cmov" instruction was the problem.
According to this page this instruction is optional according to
whatever spec there is of what it takes to be an i686, but that often
"i686" code includes this instruction. I've seen other stuff that
suggested that newer gcc versions had corrected this.
Anyone know for sure?
I, of course, had similar upgrade problems to the original poster.
I don't really care about the performance optimizations from "i386"
to "i686" as long as i'll continue to have something that works.
One additional interesting data point. The CentOS 4.0 installer
gave me the "i586" glibc and the "i686" kernel. I would hope that
this would be consistent.
danno
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