Changing the default 32-bit x86 arch for Fedora 12 (#2)

[Martin Langhoff]

On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 4:48 PM, Bill Nottingham<notting at redhat.com> wrote:
> Peter Robinson (pbrobinson at gmail.com) said:
>> > I know of *no one* in the community who tests on i586 to ensure that it
>> > works. (If this drags them out of silence, so be it!) It is certainly not
>> > part of the QA matrix for testing RCs. On the kernel side, I doubt the kernel
>> > team even has hardware around that they could test fixes on.
>>
>> Well geode is technically i586 even though it has cmov. I use two of
>> them on a pretty regular basis. There are quite a few of the community
>> who have XOs as part of the testing program that handed them out in
>> the F10 devel period and I know a number of RedHat engineers have them
>> as well so there is a least some hardware around for testing.
>
> Geode (at least the variant in the XO, and later models) isn't intended
> to be dropped here. There are earlier Geodes (the original version was
> 486-ish) that wouldn't be supported.

I don't know how much of a 686 the Geode ("586+cmov") we use is, in
the sense that I hope people (Chris, Deepak) have looked at this and
ensured there are no other dragons lurking.

To note: it _is_ reported as a 586, so at least ancillary work in
yum/anaconda/rpm will be needed so that installing F12 on these
"supported but not quite 686 CPUs" is possible, avoiding the hackery
of installing it on a true 686 and then transferring the image to the
XO.

Do we have a good and reliable way to spot the properly supported CPUs?

cheers,



m
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