Re: debian architecture history question

[Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net>]

On 06/12/2010 09:11 PM, Anand Sivaram wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 22:39, Aaron Toponce <aaron.toponce@gmail.com
> <mailto:aaron.toponce@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     On 6/11/2010 11:03 AM, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
>      > I'm not exactly sure what the policy is for packages in the i386
>     archives in
>      > general, but I believe they are supposed to have -586 or -686 in
>     their package
>      > name is they require those instruction sets.  Some of the A/V
>     codec libraries
>      > had stuff like that for a while, IIRC.  I believe currently they
>     auto-probe
>      > for the processor features and use what is available at runtime.
>
>     Other than the kernel, which is compiled for 686 instruction sets, and
>     maybe a few core packages that would benefit from targeting the 686
>     architecture, Debian compiles the rest of the packages against 386.
>
>
> There is no 386 kernel available.  Kernel starts from 486 only.

Because of, I think, libc6.  Some functions since 5ish years ago 
need opcodes that don't in the 80386.

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