FESco meeting summary for 20090507

[Bill Nottingham]

Jeremy Katz (katzj at redhat.com) said: 
> On Sunday, May 10 2009, Jon Stanley said:
> > Moreover, with the new architecture support feature in F11, we're now
> > supposedly defaulting to an x86_64 kernel on an i686 install if the
> > processor supports it (note that I say supposedly because I've not
> > personally tested it).  Thus you have an x86_64 kernel, and all of the
> > goodness that brings, but you still have an i686 userspace.
> 
> Due to some complications, we fell back to the contingency and aren't
> installing the x86_64 kernel on the 32bit distro at all for F11 quite a
> while ago[1]

To elaborate:

- yum uses the running architecture to determine $basearch to use in
  your repo files
- Hence, installing an x86_64 kernel means yum immediately switches
  you to the x86_64 repo. Oops.

Also, you'd need one of:

- rpm code to allow installing x86_64 kernels when the host arch was x86
  *OR*
- syslinux/grub code for automatically picking the right kernel, and
  anaconda changes to ship both on the image


While we did create some patches, fixing this in a way that simultaneously:

- didn't require changes to existing repo files
- wasn't extremely gross

is non-trivial.

Bill