Ferris mini distro for Redhat 7.2

Posted 4 Nov 2001 at 13:50 UTC by monkeyiq Share This

In light of how large the dependencies for an install of Ferris were getting I recently took the time to build i686 rpms for Redhat 7.2.

All packages other than what is provided by Redhat are provided to fully ferris enable a Redhat machine. See here for downloads.

libferris is a virtual filesystem that exposes hierarchical data of all kinds through a common C++ interface.


Note: i686 RPMs don't work on *all* i686's., posted 4 Nov 2001 at 14:17 UTC by davej » (Master)

Note that offering 686 RPMs is a good thing, but only when i586 (or better, i386) RPMs are also available. Recent CPUs such as the VIA Cyrix family don't support the CMOV instruction which gcc generates in 686 code, but report themselves as a 686 CPU (Which is completely valid, programs should check the cpuid capabilities before using CMOV). Running code compiled for 686 on them will crash and burn.

Perhaps the functionality has now been added to RPM to stop it installing 686 RPMs on these CPUs, but it's something to be aware of when creating packages whilst offering no alternative.

As a sidenote, would freshmeat not be a better place for your announcement?

The 686 versus 686 question, posted 4 Nov 2001 at 14:30 UTC by alan » (Master)

Current RPM4 knows about the fact the gnu tools output "686" code which is actually "686 + optional cmov instruction".

In general 686 optimisation right now isnt a big win - it may get more so in future gcc3 I don't know for sure. And for Athlon it really seems to be the case that the cpu scheduling is flexible enough it doesnt matter what you feed it (within reason)

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!

X
Share this page