On Mon, 7 Jul 2003, Benjamin J. Weiss wrote:
> Okay, this is probably a silly question, but:
>
> I've got a Pentium III Coppermine (Celeron?) 866 MHz processor. Now, I
> typically install from RPM's, because it's so easy. But I was just
> thinking that many of these RPM's have i386 or noarch in their names.
> Does this mean that they're running slower on my processor than they
> would if I downloaded source and compiled? And if I *did* download
> source and compile, would RedHat network still keep me up to date for
> security patches and such?
The i386 RPMs use the i386 instruction set, but instruction sequencing is
optimized for i686. The i686 RPMs use i686 instructions and won't work on
older architectures. The most important RPMs that benefit from i686
instructions are the kernel, glibc, and openssl, which is why RH builds
them. Some other RPMs might gain some from i686 instructions, but most
will not gain a lot. Some people report improvements from rebuilding
XFree86 and GNOME/KDE, but I haven't seen any reliable benchmarks. The
i586 kernel should only be used on an actual i586.
RHN can't know about packages you've installed from source, but you could
rebuild the RPM from the SRPM and install it. RHN would report updates,
but if you used it to install them, you'd get the i386 one.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Ben
>
>
>
--
Matthew Saltzman
Clemson University Math Sciences
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs
--
redhat-list mailing list
unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
