Angelo, I believe your confusion is stemming from a misunderstanding of the -march and -mcpu flags to GCC. They seem similar, but perform different tasks. -mcpu specifies which architecture the compiler should optimize for. This essentially changes the order of certain instructions such that the specified architecture will benefit. This is supposedly set to i686 in fedora core. -march specifies which architecture's instructions should be used. Setting this to i686 will bring in the new i686 instructions that Alan has already stated don't really make much difference (and in some cases slow things down). This is left at i386 for the majority of fedora core (as it won't make much difference) and is only set to i686 for the kernel, glibc, etc. where it helps. --Mark Drago
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