On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 10:31 AM, Robert Heller heller@deepsoft.com wrote:
At Sun, 09 Jan 2011 09:31:19 -0500 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
Hi List, just doing my weekly yum update and noticed that the kernel is designated .i686 but the headers package is .i386?? surely the headers should match the kernel geometry that it was compiled for? confused.
The headers package contains no compiled code -- it only contains source code (.h files). As such it is processor netural. It really could be '.noarch', but the version of rpmbuild shipped with CentOS 5.5 does not allow the creation of .noarch sub-packages packages.
This will work in RHEL 6/CentOS 6. The cutesiness needed to provide such packages in .noarch for more recent releases, and .%{arch} for older releases, is already in a lot of the upstream RHEL and EPEL packages.
The kernel itself is optimized for the i686 processor. It is possible to custom build a kernel for the i586, i486, or i386 if you really have a processor that old.
And highly, highly recommended to use a kernel optimized for i686 if that's your real architecture: there's a big performance difference.