Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 01:48:16AM +0000, Tim Channon wrote:
Mitchell Laks wrote:
Hi,
Question 1:
On one machine I am running a 32 bit debian install on a amd64 bit machine.
I run 64 bit on another machine, and this one is an older install.
I am running sid.
Which of these kernels is appropriate?
linux-image-2.6-24-1-486
linux-image-2.6-24-1-686
linux-image-2.6-24-1-k7
I assume that the kernel by apt-cache show
linux-image-2.6-24-1-amd64 listed is the 64 bit kernel, which will be
inappropriate for my old 32 bit installation.
apt is clever enough to choose the best one. For AMD64 32 bit mode will
be K7, the machine I am using to write this, except that is Testing.
k7 appears to be dead. use -686 or roll your own.
Dead? k7 is in etch, lenny and sid
There have been bug issues with Deb 4 over AMD SMP needing the K7
variant and there is the matter of gcc4 biasing to Intel. Which is
installed is also related to which install is used. CD1 does not include
K7 but DVD1 does and netinstall will use it too.
Apparently popularity shows a rather large usage out there. It doesn't
of course follow that k7 is the best choice.
This seems to have caused so much bad vibes that gcc4.22 includes an
automatic cpu detection -march=native but precompiled cannot use that.
This is quite complicated into versions, here for example with AM2 it
not the same as some earlier.
Does the kernel react to the actual processor and adjust accordingly?
The integration of SMP into common kernels might have a bearing on
things and says that the kernel does react to the detail architecture.
I would welcome some hard fact input on what is going on.
Sure someone can compile a kernel but if we wanted that we would use a
much better Linux for the purpose such as Gentoo.
Performance is not an issue here so all this is personally academic. I'd
be more interested in a viable 64 bit version but I don't actually need
that either.
The Deb kernel handbook says
"In order to build a working kernel for certain classes of hardware or
with a desired feature set, additional changes to the Debian kernel
source may be required. In that case, the patch set applied to produce a
modified tree determines the subarchitecture. Again, multiple flavours
of binary images may be build from the subarchitecture tree. For
example, the i386 architecture has a number of different flavours, such
as 486, 686 and k7, built from the common Debian kernel source. It also
contains xen, vserver and xen-vserver subarchitectures. The source tree
for building the kernels for each of these subarchitectures is obtained
by applying additional patches to the Debian kernel source.It may be
used to build the xen-686 and xen-k7 binary image flavours. The names of
the Debian binary packages incorporate the name of the flavour and, if
necessary, the name of the subarchitecture (there is no need to worry
about the name of the architecture, since Debian tools will only allow
installation of the packages with "correct" architecture)."
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