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Originally Posted by tjroamer
Oh, got it. I got confused, because I saw some released linux packages still have 586, 686 version. Why I asked this question is that I did not know which package is suitable for my cpu architecture.
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If your CPU is a pentium II or newer, your CPU ought to be compatible with most binary distributions. 686 is the generic "everything newer than Pentium" group, which I consider badly named because Cyrix once made a cpu called the 686 that has little to do with it. The flags might be more important:
Code:
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss nx pni
Bolded a few you might recognize. If a program is compiled to build these things in, and and your CPU doesn't have them, these programs can crash. You're not likely to see these flags used in compilation.
Not that some programs won't use these instruction sets, they just won't be
hardwired to use them. things like mplayer do lots of checks to see what instructions you have and switch routines accordingly.
Don't mix 586 and 686 packages though, keep them the same.