Kernel Images

Tom Adelstein adelste at yahoo.com
Tue May 31 16:26:45 UTC 2005


On Tue, 2005-05-31 at 11:23 -0400, Michael R Head wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-05-30 at 16:14 -0700, Randy Forston wrote:
> > 
> > It would seem that since the K7 wasn't around when uname was written, I
> > expect it looks for certain features and does some timing and if the result
> > meets a certain standard, it assumes your cpu is the faster version of the
> > intel.
> 
> uname gets its information from libc, which gets the information from
> the kernel. The Athlon and P2 instruction architectures are essentially
> the same (extensions such as SSE, MMX, 3dnow are just that --
> extensions), so they are all reported as i686.
> 
> mike
> 
> > Randy
> 

The information in the Ubuntu repository tells you which kernel image to
use. Some features of the Pentium class i686 architecture do not work
with AMD. So, if you have an Athlon, Sempron, Athlon XP, etc. and you
get i686 then use the k7 kernel.

I'm going to write about recompiling the Ubuntu kernel to optimize
performance next week in my Linux Journal column. So, I suggest you get
the Linux-image and install that so you have the source code with which
to do a recompile.

In the meantime, http://packages.ubuntu.com/hoary/misc/kernel-package

http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/KernelCompileHowto

are pretty good documents.

If you haven't even recompiled a kernel, you 're missing some serious
fun.

When you do recompile the kernel, you're building it on your system with
your environment. 

Tomas





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