Re: I suppose is a bug. Pentium4 architecture not full supported ...

On Mon, 2004-09-13 at 18:14 +0200, Dr. Giovanni A. Orlando wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>     Implementing a new feature on our OS, I get a bug abouty the command 
> "arch",
>     and at the same time: "rpm". But the real trouble is inside glib.h
> 
>     In fact, On a Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III and Pentium 4, 
> you will get
>     the "arch" output equals to "i686".
> 
>     While I can accept Pentium Pro/II/III, for "i686" I cannot accept 
> the Pentium 4.
> 
>     If you go to the Kernel, the tag i686 regards The Pentium Pro, and 
> not the Pentium 4.
> 

In my experience, when you configure your kernel, and you tell it
specifically that your processor is a Pentium 4, the resultant kernel
still uses "i686", as reported by uname. I've never seen any tag such as
"ipentium4" used by the kernel (contrast this with 'athlon' which is
what the kernel shows if you compiled for an athlon processor). 

This sounds like an issue/RFE for the kernel, but I'm willing to bet
they had their reasons to lump the Pentium Pro/Pentium III/Pentium 4
together. 

IMO, if the kernel says "i686" then the other utilities you are
referencing (including RPM) should use "i686". Things which need a more
specific knowledge of what processor you have should use alternate
mechanisms to discover it (/proc/cpuinfo, for instance).

Of course, if you wanted a custom, non-standard and probably
incompatible way to get by, you could play with setarch. Then you could
make arch (and uname -m) return whatever you wanted.