Re: i686 quirk for AMD Geode

H. Peter Anvin
2009-11-09T21:19:13Z

On 10/04/2009 07:58 AM, Alan Cox wrote:
>> I'm surprised that "i686" in debian depends on the family flag
>> in /proc/cpuinfo.. but hey.. weirder things have been done.
>
> Its compensating for the old gcc bugs where gcc "i686" generated cmov
> instructions without any checks whether the CPU supported cmov (which is
> optional for a 686 architecture)
>
> RPM has (or had) similar hacks. Both arguably come about from fundamental
> design thinkos in that they treat architecture as "special", not simply
> as a set of dependancies (needs x86, x86-cmov, glibc x86-32, ...) as
> should hve been done and which would also have made emulators just work
> out of the box instead of the current mess.
>
> Alan

Well, for gcc, the string "i686" really means "pentiumpro". All of
these are nothing but named feature sets.

-hpa