On Sun, Apr 15, 2007 at 07:24:40PM -0800, Junior wrote: > Hi All, > I have two questions the first is a bit off topic. > > Have anyone ever installed debian on a dual core Intel® Pentium® D processor > 950 (Intel® EM64T) processor? > I've never tried a dual core CPU before neither a 64bit. I've tried the > i386/686 install and ran into a few problems primarily with udev which causes > several devices to fail after a "successfull" install. Several devices also > failed but I think I might be doing the wrong install. Should I be using the > ia64 install? Any recommendations? >
Please wrap your lines at 72 characters. It makes it a deal easier to read. The ia64 is for the Intel Itanium ONLY: not for any other AMD Sempron/Turion/Opteron or Intel Pentium/Xeon or whatever. If you want to run a 64 bit capable OS on an "Intel x86" type box, you need Debian's amd64. It was named amd64 before Intel had released an "x86-64" type box. The same code will run on the AMDs and Intel EM64T with no problem. > The other question is regarding armel. What is is? Is it just another > toolchain or is there more to it? > I'm trying to explain this to my LUG tomorrow night. Welcome to my dress rehearsal :) Debian has had (at least) three different ARM toolchains at different times. [The Emdebian - Embedded Debian - stuff is not in consideration here - it's not yet a fully fledged Debian port as far as I can see and is still in very active development and flux. ] The original - and still primary - Debian ARM distribution is known simply as "arm". ARMs can work either in Big or Little Endian mode. Main Debian "arm" is a little endian distribution and will run on RISC PC's, StrongARM chips and the earlier ARM version chipsets. When the NSLU2 was introduced, the initial Linux embedded on the device was Big Endian as was the (proprietary) Intel driver for the on-board Ethernet and there were arguments that BE would work better. Thus a Big Endian port of the existing Debian packages was made - entailing a re-compile of every binary - and got to several thousand packages. [armeb]. At that point, someone got the Intel driver code to work little endian and a Debian kernel was bootstrapped to fit in the flash with some of the original Redboot still in place. This allowed boot from the Slug, transfer to a kernel on external hard disk/flash but, most importantly, use of the unmodified little endian binaries from "arm". Since then, APEX has replaced Redboot, allowing larger kernels in flash on the Slug _and_ there is now a fully free driver which works with the Intel embedded ethernet. So today, you can flash a fully working kernel, build a Debian system and the last stage before reboot is basically to reflash the machine once again installing APEX and a new kernel image onto the Slug itself. EABI is the new Embedded ABI from ARM Ltd. which will allow support for more ARM variants, deals better with floating point issues and is full of wibbly goodness. The Debian port using the new EABI will be known as "armel": it's still very early stages yet but it will mean lots of recompiles for what is effectively a new Debian "architecture" running on the same known hardware. "arm" and "armel" will both be Little Endian but will not be mutually compatible as I understand the wiki. Hope this helps :) Andy > Much thanks. > --Junior
