RPM packages: Athlon vs i686 vs i386

Eric Diamond eric at ediamond.net
Mon Mar 8 16:34:07 UTC 2004


>Sunday, March 07, 2004 8:38 PM, Don Dixon wrote:
>
>Hmmm, I can't find a reference to 2.4 in the link.  So
if it is true 
>that it is referring to 2.4 as well, >does that mean
there is no difference between the updates
kernel-2.4.22-1.2174.nptl.athlon.rpm and a
>kernel-2.4.22-1.2174.nptl.i686.rpm?

Until recently rebuilt a couple of customer firewalls
running RH7.3 on an AMD platform (now running FC1), but
I don't remember if the console logon stated the
processor type as Athlon or i686. All my current AMD
boxes, both RH9 and FC1 have i686. I also remember an
old RH7.1 box I ran on a K6-2 that displayed i586...

I'm sure you're running the athlon kernel, anaconda
would have caught that, but just to make sure, run both
of these...

cat /boot/kernel.h

This will tell you what procesor type your running
kernel was built for...

rpm -qa | grep kernel

This will display all kernel packages currently
installed on your system...

Both will most likely show that you are running an
athlon optimized kernel.

To echo Alexanders comments, use either yum or up2date
to handle your package updates. While I'm all for
learning how to do everything there's a wizard for
manually, dependency management is a Royal Pain In The
Ass. Way too time consuming and relatively easy to screw
up. Use the updaters!

BTW, if you have more than a couple versions of the
kernel show up in the output of the rpm command, you
might want to consider doing an 'rpm -e' on the older
kernels you're not going to run anymore. With the rate
at which the Fedora kernels are being released, /boot
will start filling up faster than you might think.

Eric Diamond
eDiamond Networking & Security
303-246-9555
eric at ediamond.net
  





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