On Tue, Jun 26, 2007 at 02:09:07PM +0200, Steffen Grunewald wrote:
OK, I see the point to some amount at least. Still I'm wondering why we do not fill in something more useful than "unknown" - the processor type is not completely unknown to us admitted that this info is already in the machine type.
Because it's not uname's job to guess what you mean by processor type. The right answer is going to be something like "Geode by NSC" or "Intel(R) Pentium(R) III CPU - S 1400MHz". An openbsd system will say something like "AMD Am5x86 W/B 133/160 ("AuthenticAMD" 486-class)". "i686" is flat out the wrong answer for this question. The bigger question is *why* you would want to know this. The *right* answer in almost every case is that you want to use processor specific features (or you don't need to know this at all) and you should be checking processor feature flags (e.g., see the flags: line in /proc/cpuinfo) rather than guessing what features are supported based on the cpu type (because as soon as a new cpu comes along you won't know what it supports). Well written code will check those flags at run time.
Bottom line: the use of uname -p is almost certainly a mistake in whatever application is using it, regardless of what debian reports when that option is used.
Mike Stone -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
