On Mon, 2006-08-14 at 16:09 +0000, Matt Zimmerman wrote: > On Mon, Aug 14, 2006 at 03:55:03PM -0000, Ben Collins wrote: > > I'd pretty much prefer not to standardize on -686. I'm considering > > changing the name of -386 to -generic. Mainly because people hardly ever > > keep -386 on their computer because they think -686 will work so much > > better, when that isn't the case. For Most desktop users (read, any user > > with one core/cpu) should be using the -386(/-generic) kernel. There's > > not much benefit from the -686 kernel for UP systems (there never was, > > not even when -686 was a UP kernel). > > > > We should standardize on the stock -386(/-generic) kernel. > > If -386 is intended for most systems, and -686 for SMP systems, we should > name them "generic" and "smp". > > We should standardize on a kernel which supports multiprocessor/multicore > systems, as they are becoming very common in desktops.
I'm not saying that -686 is only meant for SMP, I'm saying that generally, it's not going to give much benefit except on those systems. Certain situations, even on UP call for the -686 kernel (e.g. running 32-bit on a xeon, or 32-bit on a AMD64 in the k7 case). > > My question is, why is ubuntu-desktop depending on kernel headers > > anyway? Is it because of things like vmware, or just for convenience? > > It's for building kernel modules, as discussed extensively on -devel. I fell behind on -devel when I took a week off, guess I marked that thread as "read" without noticing it. Fact of the matter is, I would be content having one SMP enabled kernel for x86. The benefits are becoming fuzzy at best for different flavours, given these reasons: 1) With SMP-Alt code, we no longer have a need for seperate SMP/UP kernels. This code is included in stock kernels now. 2) With Generic Arch support (that's been there for a long time) in the 386 kernel, the same code that does SMP-Alt also rewrites certain portions of code to run better on the CPU on which it was booted, by checking CPU flags and making adjustments based on this. We already get this benefit in our 386 kernel, which is why I claim people generally don't need to use the -686 or -k7 kernels. I would bet that a 486 generic arch, SMP enabled kernel would run within 1% of any arch specific kernels we have. It would standardize the kernels, and headers and make things hugely easy for maintenance. The only downside to this is that some legacy drivers (would have to get a list) cannot be compiled with SMP support. They simply wont even load. There's also one very popular driver that is known to be very unstable under SMP (the rt2500 wireless driver). So I think the goal, from my point of view at least, is that x86 in the future will have three kernels: -generic, -server and -server-bigiron. This may also become the case for x86_64. Currently we have a -amd64-generic that's SMP enabled, and I'm not sure the -k8 and -xeon kernels are even needed. -- Edgy ubuntu-desktop depends on linux-headers-686 https://launchpad.net/bugs/56141 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
