K6 kernel or 486 kernel??
 

I have a K6 laptop. I realized last week when I upgraded to kernel 2.4.29 that my 2.4.26 kernel that Slack 10 installed was for a 486 cpu. That worked ok (I did have problems with my PMCIA nic card getting assigned an IP addy), but I'm wondering if I'd get better performance from this old 350 MHz AMD K6 if I redid the kernel again and compiled it as a K6...or would this cause problems for apps that I built with my 486 kernel??

It'll run smoother if the kernel is optimized for the CPU it's running on. That's why you have the option.

Theoretically, at least, having the wrong kernel won't prevent the *system* from running, but any applications that use CPU-specific function calls such as MMX or 3D Now! functions, will *not* work at all if they're being told they have a CPU that supports the functions when it doesn't. That's the other reason you set the CPU in the kernel: to enable/disable support for these extended instruction sets.

The reason the install kernel is optimized for a '486 is because '386/'486 CPUs didn't support MMX or any CPU extensions, just the basic x86 instruction set. Any program written specifically for it (bad karma to write your program specific to a single CPU and not to the POSIX standard) will work fine on a later CPU, because the later CPUs had support for all of the instructions they did.


So short answer: go ahead and compile for the K6 CPU, because it won't adversely affect you.

keep in mind that the slackware i486 kernel is already built with support for i686... also, it's very unlikely you'll experience any performance boost by re-compiling, AFAIK...

some threads you might wanna check-out:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...postid=1526946

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=295787

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=255113

just my two cents...