Comments on: What good is the “arch” field? http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/what-good-is-the-arch-field/ K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences Mon, 11 Feb 2013 18:19:59 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: My uglified ConnochaetOS beta 2 desktop « Motho ke motho ka botho http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/what-good-is-the-arch-field/#comment-47121 Fri, 10 Dec 2010 13:44:59 +0000 http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/what-good-is-the-arch-field/#comment-47121 [...] we discussed that last month. Suffice to say that a few additional keystrokes don’t delay me that [...]

]]> By: anon http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/what-good-is-the-arch-field/#comment-46374 Sat, 13 Nov 2010 11:37:58 +0000 http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/what-good-is-the-arch-field/#comment-46374 Silly boy, i686 is the Pentium Pro’s version. It doesn’t need MMX, and SSE was introduced with the PIII.

]]> By: mulenmar http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/what-good-is-the-arch-field/#comment-46370 Sat, 13 Nov 2010 04:38:29 +0000 http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/what-good-is-the-arch-field/#comment-46370 Not quite.

i386 refers to anything compatible with the Intel 80386, a processor two generations older than the original Pentium. i386 indicates that none of the optimized instructions (MMX, SSE, et cetera) available in later CPUs are used or required.
Software compiled for i386 will run on any x86-type CPU, albeit more slowly — especially for multimedia apps.

i686 refers to anything compatible with the Pentium 2 or newer. It indicates that MMX and SSE instructions are used/required — thus better performance in applications that take advantage of them, but REQUIRES a Pentium 2 or compatible, or newer.

At least, that’s my understanding. :P

]]> By: K.Mandla http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/what-good-is-the-arch-field/#comment-46366 Fri, 12 Nov 2010 22:52:20 +0000 http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/what-good-is-the-arch-field/#comment-46366 I see. I’ve been looking at it from the perspective of a braking flag or a continuous error to be avoided, where it’s more intended for weeding out software that won’t run on one or the other architecture.

Thanks everybody. ;)

]]> By: Mr Architecture http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/what-good-is-the-arch-field/#comment-46364 Fri, 12 Nov 2010 22:31:37 +0000 http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/what-good-is-the-arch-field/#comment-46364 Hey, I’m still trying to get my ahead around i386/i686. Someone call it one, some call it the other, yet they both refer to the same thing?

]]> By: LeoSolaris http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/what-good-is-the-arch-field/#comment-46360 Fri, 12 Nov 2010 14:59:03 +0000 http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/what-good-is-the-arch-field/#comment-46360 It’s declaring, before you start building the package, where the package is known to compile without errors. Some packages you can just add the ‘x86_64′ and it will compile and run (mostly with python/java packages, I’ve noticed, because the language is designed to be architecture independent) but not all programs will compile under different architectures. Sometimes there is significant changes needed in the code itself to make it compilable on different arches. If it were easy to port to other arches, ARM would have been covered, for instance. While x86_64 is related to and similar to i686, there are a few differences.

(No worries about ignorance. I could be wrong, too. I am still a neophyte programmer.)

]]> By: nflenz http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/what-good-is-the-arch-field/#comment-46359 Fri, 12 Nov 2010 13:49:56 +0000 http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/what-good-is-the-arch-field/#comment-46359 The arch field isn’t for optimization. It’s the architecture the software can run on. It’s useful because not all PKGBUILDs create packages from source. Heres’s an example:

http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/lotus-notes-sametime/lotus-notes-sametime/PKGBUILD.

This package would not run on my x86_64 Arch system.

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