On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 10:31 AM, Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com> wrote: > At Sun, 09 Jan 2011 09:31:19 -0500 CentOS mailing list <centos at 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.