[arch-releng] [archiso] [PATCH] Reintroduce the possibility to force an architecture

[Lukas Fleischer]

On Fri, 08 Aug 2014 at 01:14:16, Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi wrote:
> On 08/07/2014 01:05 PM, Lukas Fleischer wrote:
> [...]
> > +* arch=             Force an architecture type (i686 | x86_64).
> > +                    Do not set it for normal operations.
> > +                    Useful for running a 64 bit kernel / 32 bit userspace.
> > +                    Default: (architecture of running kernel)
> >  
> >  
> >  ** hooks/archiso_pxe_common
> > 
> 
> OK. I will add it, but help message should be different, since aitab
> does not exist anymore, just remove "Useful for running a 64 bit kernel
> / 32 bit userspace." and maybe add message about these broken machines.
> 

Ok, will remove that part and resubmit.

> This should be fixed at kernel level, there is a open/closed report
> about this?
> 

It is a bit more complicated. There has been a lot of discussion on AMD
Geode processors and i686. Just Google for "AMD Geode i686" or "AMD
Geode NOPL". They are reported as i586 as of commit a7ef94e in the Linux
kernel [1]. However, there were some binutils changes that result in the
NOPL instruction (the only i686 instruction that isn't available on the
AMD Geode) not being used in Arch packages, see [2], so everything works
fine. There might be other similar (maybe exotic) architectures, so
given the simplicity of this patch (~10 additional bytes and some
documentation) and the gained flexibility, I think it should definitely
be added.

> Thanks
> 
> 

[1] https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=a7ef94e6889186848573a10c5bdb8271405f44de
[2] https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=6957