Re: detecting i386 or x86_64 in kickstart

[John Summerfield <debian herakles homelinux org>]

Binand Sethumadhavan wrote:
> On 19/02/07, Klaus Steden <klaus steden thomson net> wrote:
>
> > > Newbie-ish question... what exactly is the difference between i686 and
> > > x86_64? I imagine athlon is specifically for AMD 64-bit processors?
> > >
> > One short answer is that a 32-bit CPU (i386 - Pentium, Athlon, etc.) uses
> > 32-bit addressing, while a 64-bit CPU (x86_64 - Opteron, Itanium, 
> > etc.) uses
> > 64-bit addressing -- meaning your OS and applications can address more 
> > than 4
> > GB of memory at one time.
>
>
> I know that much... my question was specifically about x86_64 and i686
> (since I was under the impression that i686 also means a 64-bit
> processor).
>
> I imagine i686 covers a much wider range of CPUs, not all of which are 
> 64-bit?

Trye, As does "athlon."

Similar on other architectures too, not all Sparcs, Powers, S/360 family 
CPUs do 64-bits. Doubtless the flags depend on atchitecture too: the 
flags register is an 8086 thing, S/370 uses control registers for this 
(and more).


--

Cheers
John

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