Upgrade of i585 to i686 server

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Thu, 5 Aug 2004, James Wilkinson wrote:

> Jim Higson wrote:
> > No, 586 is Pentium (Pent = five, ium = bugger all).
> > No need to change the kernel. There aren't special builds for CPU
> > architectures in Fedora
>
> Are you sure about that? It looks like there are seperate kernels for
> i586 and i686 to me...

OK.  i586 is the very original Pentium (AKA Pentium I, AKA P5) and Pentium
MMX.  i686 (AKA P6) is anything later, including Pentium II.

>
> > and it isn't really needed anyway.
>
> Now *that's* right. You'll get a bit more performance with the right
> kernel, but you should boot fine on a Pentium II with a 586 kernel.

An i586 kernel will run on an i686, but the instruction-sequencing
optimizations for i586 are unique to that chip.  Also, P6 has some more
instructions.  I know there will be a performance gain moving to an i686
kernel, but I don't know how noticable it will be.

If you have a P6, you definitely want the i686 glibc, as it supports NPTL
threads, which the i386 library does not.  You also want the i686 openssl
package.

The best way to upgrade kernel and glibc is probably to boot from a rescue
disk.  Then you can make RPM update the system mounted in /mnt/sysimage.
I *think* you want "rpm -Fvh --force --root /mnt/sysimage <package-name>",
but I wouldn't swear to it.

>
> The original poster, Tony, needs to post some of his errors for us to
> take a look at if we are to help.
>
> James.
>

-- 
		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs