Re: Sarge, kernel-image, and i586-SMP

[Wouter Verhelst <wouter@grep.be>]

On Mon, Aug 09, 2004 at 04:03:34PM -0400, Steaphan Greene wrote:
> I would not mind it being slow.  However, since there seems to be
> absolutely no SMP support for 586 OR BELOW,

s/OR BELOW//

There is no _hardware_ support in 486 or below for SMP, so don't even
bother trying to build a kernel with SMP support for those.

Which leads me to...

It could make sense to build an SMP kernel for <686, but then you'd need
to do it 586-specific anyway; the logical step would then be to build a
"regular" 586-specific kernel (otherwise you'll get loads of wishlist
bugs to do those), which then leads you to, uhm, *a lot* of kernels. Is
that worth it?

> I must roll my own or ignore one of my processors.  That's what
> bothers me.  Even a 386-smp kernel would be fine by me.  I just would
> like to be able to automagically update my stable kernel whenever
> needed (like I do on most of my other machines).  This machine is
> intended as my stable machine, not my workhorse (obviously), and I'd
> like to not have to give it too much though to make sure it was stable
> and secure.
> 
> ...besides, ever compiled the current kernel on a 586? ;)

No. That'd be silly. You do have a faster machine where you could run
make-kpkg and transfer files off of, don't you? It's not as if
using dpkg-scanpackages to create a Packages file (so that you could put
it in the router's sources.list) is hard...

> Yes, I know I could compile it on another machine and make a package,
> I'd just like to not have to.

Why not?

> Is there a reason this kernel flavor is ignored (is it just because
> they are rare?)?

Yes.

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