586 vs 686

Jarod Wilson jarod at redhat.com
Thu Feb 19 15:31:52 UTC 2009


Mike Chambers wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-02-19 at 10:25 +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
> 
>> If your running a 32bit OS (most intel desktop/server systems are
>> 64bit now) you get a i686 kernel if your system supports PAE and an
>> i586 kernel if your system doesn't. There was a large discussion about
>> this in fedora-devel.
> 
> Mine is a lower end HP system I guess, with max of 4G ram (currently
> only using 2G).  So I am assuming this isn't a PAE type system?

'grep pae /proc/cpuinfo' to know if your cpu supports pae.

Regardless, the new rules apply primarily to *new* installs, not 
upgrades. If you had the old kernel.i686, the only sane upgrade path is 
to kernel.i586, unless yum grew the smarts to know that you have PAE 
support and/or a 64-bit capable cpu. Even then, people might have reason 
to stick with kernel.i586 (their crappy out-of-tree driver doesn't work 
w/either PAE or 64-bit), so we shouldn't be changing arches or packages 
on them. So for upgrades, you'll have to move to kernel-PAE.i686 or 
kernel.x86_64 manually at first, if you can/want to make that change.

--jarod




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