Re: A bit off topic
On Sun, Apr 15, 2007 at 07:24:40PM -0800, Junior wrote:
> Hi All,
> I have two questions the first is a bit off topic.
>
> Have anyone ever installed debian on a dual core Intel® Pentium® D processor 950 (Intel® EM64T) processor?
> I've never tried a dual core CPU before neither a 64bit. I've tried the i386/686 install and ran into a few problems primarily with udev which causes several devices to fail after a "successfull" install. Several devices also failed but I think I might be doing the wrong install. Should I be using the ia64 install? Any recommendations?
>
Please wrap your lines at 72 characters. It makes it a deal easier to
read. The ia64 is for the Intel Itanium ONLY: not for any other
AMD Sempron/Turion/Opteron or Intel Pentium/Xeon or whatever.
If you want to run a 64 bit capable OS on an "Intel x86" type box,
you need Debian's amd64. It was named amd64 before Intel had released
an "x86-64" type box. The same code will run on the AMDs and Intel EM64T
with no problem.
> The other question is regarding armel. What is is? Is it just another toolchain or is there more to it?
>
I'm trying to explain this to my LUG tomorrow night. Welcome to my dress
rehearsal :)
Debian has had (at least) three different ARM toolchains at different
times. [The Emdebian - Embedded Debian - stuff is not in consideration
here - it's not yet a fully fledged Debian port as far as I can see and
is still in very active development and flux. ]
The original - and still primary - Debian ARM distribution is known
simply as "arm". ARMs can work either in Big or Little Endian mode.
Main Debian "arm" is a little endian distribution and will run on RISC
PC's, StrongARM chips and the earlier ARM version chipsets.
When the NSLU2 was introduced, the initial Linux embedded on the device
was Big Endian as was the (proprietary) Intel driver for the on-board
Ethernet and there were arguments that BE would work better. Thus a Big
Endian port of the existing Debian packages was made - entailing a
re-compile of every binary - and got to several thousand packages.
[armeb].
At that point, someone got the Intel driver code to work little endian
and a Debian kernel was bootstrapped to fit in the flash with some of
the original Redboot still in place. This allowed boot from the Slug,
transfer to a kernel on external hard disk/flash but, most importantly,
use of the unmodified little endian binaries from "arm".
Since then, APEX has replaced Redboot, allowing larger kernels in flash
on the Slug _and_ there is now a fully free driver which works with the
Intel embedded ethernet. So today, you can flash a fully working kernel,
build a Debian system and the last stage before reboot is basically to
reflash the machine once again installing APEX and a new kernel image
onto the Slug itself.
EABI is the new Embedded ABI from ARM Ltd. which will allow support for
more ARM variants, deals better with floating point issues and is full
of wibbly goodness. The Debian port using the new EABI will be known as
"armel": it's still very early stages yet but it will mean lots of
recompiles for what is effectively a new Debian "architecture" running
on the same known hardware. "arm" and "armel" will both be Little Endian
but will not be mutually compatible as I understand the wiki.
Hope this helps :)
Andy
> Much thanks.
> --Junior
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