Christopher Beland wrote:
> So am I correct in assuming that all the i386 packages, including the
> i386 kernel, were backwards-compatible with i386 and i486 CPUs, even
> though officially these CPUs were not supported in Fedora 2 thru 10?
Fedora already didn't work on those machines because there was no kernel for
them. You needed a third-party kernel to even install Fedora on them. And
even then it likely only worked on i486 because GCC inadvertently broke 386
compatibility at some point (due to lack of atomic intrinsics) and recent
glibc (NPTL, to be precise) and some other software (e.g. Qt 4) also
requires i486 for the same reason. Building for i586 just makes it clear
what is actually supported, and also ensures that we get atomic intrinsics
everywhere (for example, glib2 had to be patched to enable atomic
intrinsics rather than an unsafe and slow software fallback when built for
i386, with i586 we get them automatically).
Kevin Kofler
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