On Fri, Jun 04, 2004 at 04:31:32PM +0200, Wichert Akkerman wrote: > Previously Stephen Frost wrote: > > Oh, really? That's why the kernel says i686 and gcc says i486? > > Admittedly i?86 is crap in that respect but they're basically variants > of the same thing. > > > Right, bringing in politics is useless and counter-productive, so why > > are you? Choosing amd64 isn't political, it's the argument about what > > to call it and why is political. I agree that we should just pick a > > name that will not confuse people- that's not x86-64/x86_64 which *will* > > be confusing to people as to which it is or will cause problems with our > > various tools. > > Lets look at other big distributions: > > Redhat: x86-64 (or 'Intel EM64T & AMD64' in their whitepapers) I am assuming by Redhat you are referring to their Fedora releases, since it appears their RHEL releases are called amd64. RHEL: amd64 (ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/3/en/os/AMD64/) Fedora: x86_64 (http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/2/x86_64/) > SuSE: x86_64 (or 'AMD/Intel 64-bit processors') > Gentoo: amd64 > Mandrake: AMD64 So out of the dists that support the port we have: amd64 ----- Gentoo Mandrake RHEL x86_64 (notice its underscore, no one uses x86-64 at all) ------ Fedora Suse So obviously for dists usage amd64 is more popular, with the rest using x86_64 like the toolchain, and no one at all using x86-64. ;) I think the primary reason Suse uses x86_64 is that it had its x86_64 dist available before amd64 arch was even renamed, around 2-3 years ago! Suse was the dist that AMD showed its hardware on before anything else was available. I can't find an exact date for when x86-64 changed to AMD64, but AMD64 was in use as the official arch name prior to April 2003 when the actual chips were released to the public. Chris
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature