Athlon/i686 Kernel - Extreme NOOB Warning
 

Hi, I'm scarily new to GNU/Linux, having played with an old version of SuSE many moons ago (infact when my P200 was new and shineyish).

I'm running RH8.0 and I've managed to get Nvidia drivers working, and everything else pretty much worked out of the box (still excluding winmodem- don't go there ;)- I'm not worried though because I'm on a three-week count-down to DSL.).

But having looked a few places and read a few things I'm left with a (big?) question; I've seen that there are optimised kernels for Athlon, now I have an AthlonXP based system, but my kernel is marked as optimised for i686.

So, my questions are; is this likely to be a problem? Should I optimise my kernel for Athlon? If I should, how do I do it?

A couple of thoughts on this; from first boot my "Red Hat Update Agent" is flashing red, so I need to let it online (which I will on DSL) to do some updates, will this "magically" fix this issue (or am I just proving my Noobness?)?

Cheers, and sorry if this is posted elsewhere.

It's all proof! :D Well you could upgrade your kernel to be optimized for Athlon processors, and it wouldn't hurt anything, but on the other hand, your entire system (and the programs for it) are optimized for i686, so you won't really see a major performance gain. The new GCC (version 3.2) allows for more athlon optimization on your programs and such, but you'd have to go through each program and build it from source, optimizing each package.

So basically, you should be fine with what you have, but it wouldn't hurt to get a kernel optimized for athlon either.

Cool

You'll also find that many applications are still optimized for i386 because they can then be fairly certain that it'll work on almost all machines, with PPC and other archs being the exceptions.

And 1 thing we forgot to mention...

Your athlon is x86 (i686) architecture, so you won't run into problems there if you were also worried about that.

Cool

You better be careful with the athlon optimised stuff - there are different athlon settings (6 I think) for gcc3.2 and they seem not to be too compatible.Plus all that stuff really depends how the CFLAGS are set - if it is -mcpu=cputype the code will run on anything bigger than a i386 if it is -march=cputype it will only work on the specified cpu and nothing else.