Compiling for CPU (was Re: Performance testing (pass 1))

[Craig Ringer]

> If you have an Athlon, the installer should properly detect that and
> install the athlon kernel.  If it doesn't, that's a bug.
> 
> There's also now a (undocumented, could go away someday) boot time
> option that you can use with 'linux rpmarch=i586' to override the
> detection for all those people that have asked about doing the install
> on an i686 machine and then moving the hard drive to their i586 box
> afterwards.

Ooh. Since the installer is doing auto-detection of arch, I do hope that 
option doesn't go away. I have a NSC Geode here that most things see as 
i586, but it doesn't have a working TSC so the pentium kernel will 
generally crash, and it actually performs better with i486 code (despite 
supporting MMX).

Odd hardware like this is far from unknown, so if nothing else the 
option to force the use of i386 packages would be handy to always have. 
There's also the install portability issue previously mentioned.

Craig Ringer