[Techtalk] i386 or i686?

[Mandi]

(for anyone collecting rpm arcanity...)

> On Thu, 30 Oct 2003 07:55:47 -0600, Julie <txjulie at austin.rr.com> wrote:
> 
> > If you want maximum performance, and are running a modern Pentium,
> > such as a P3 or P4, go with the i686 RPMs.
> 
> 

something to watch is that the RPM environment itself may govern which 
rpms you can install.  RPMs that require a certain processor family will 
have architecture limitations built right into the package, hopefully.  
they're listed in the specfile as "BuildArch" or "ExclusiveArch" and end 
up being part of the dependencies of the package.

most packages don't make use of those variables or take the default for 
the system, which varies by distro.  Red Hat tends to leave their stuff 
i386, and mandrake and suse seem to be running for i586.

you can get an idea of what your system is defaulted to with
	rpm -q glibc --queryformat "%{NAME}\t%{ARCH}\n"

and if you are really curious as to what is on your system, 
	rpm -qa --queryformat "%{NAME}\t%{ARCH}\n" |more
for a look at every package (this might take some time, though...)

mostly you'll find one particular processor and some "noarch" stuff.

HTH

--mandi