On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 07:50:34PM +0100, Michele Alzetta wrote: > A few days ago I started having problems with my BIOS and I thought it > was my motherboard (a while ago the inbuilt ethernet broke and I had > to pass to another card - luckily I already had a second one installed > - so something definitely HAS happened to the mobo). > > The BIOS problems seem to have disappeared by simply changing the > battery (lucky me !). > > However this started a train of thought. > I have a gentoo system with CFLAGS="-march=athlon-xp .... etc. etc. ". > > If I ever wanted to change CPU, would a 64 bit amd cpu work on this > system, or would I have to mount the system from a live CD and rebuild > it from scratch, or else rebuild it from scratch with -mcpu before > changing cpu ? > > If the motherboard broke and I wanted to change __that__ ... I imagine > my kernel might not work, so mounting the system and building a new > kernel would be a must ... > > Has anyone had experience with this sort of problem ? What would be > the safest and smoothest way to face this ?
I actually was faced with this situation a couple of months ago. My ultra-reliable K6-2/400 server finally started acting weird. A couple of weeks before, I'd upgraded my desktop, so I had a free AthlonXP board, cpu, and ram. I just backed everything up, rebuilt the kernel to make sure that I had support for the new chipset. Mind you, everything is build -march=k6. Yanked the old board, put the new one in place, held my breath, and it booted fine. Going AMD -> newer AMD or Intel -> newer Intel shouldn't be much of an issue. It's when you have to fall back where you get problems. Again, if you have a need to worry about that, put in your cflags "-march=i468 -mcpu=$your1337cpu". That way, it'll boot on anything down to a 486. I don't recommend using -march=i386 anymore because you give up some things with glibc when you do that. And using a 386 for anything but a doorstop these days is a waste of time. -- S. Bergeron, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- [email protected] mailing list
