The athlon kernel fork occurred a couple years ago when it was discovered that linux would crash under certain situations due to the different way the Athlon handles memory. Allan Cox developed a kernel patch to address the problem and the athlon fork was born. Since then, other optomizations were also added. Previously it was not considered worth the time to optimize for the Athlon since it is also compatible with all Intel instructions sets (MMX/SSE, etc.). The Athlon bug pretty much killed that idea, so it became worth it since there needed to be a forked kernel anyway. "Lucky" for us Athlon users. (Never thought a bug would do some good) John S. Anders Johansson wrote:
On Monday 22 September 2003 16.36, fsanta wrote:
Hi everyone. I just bought a new box with an AMD XP 2200 processor.YOU pulled down a big patch last night and I now have k_athlon-2.4.20-100. Is this correct for 8.2?
Yes
Also, what's the difference between the Intel and the AMD kernel anyway?
The compiler options used to build it. The athlon kernel is built with optimisations specific for the athlon instruction set, and the default kernel is built with a generic pentium instruction set that all processors can handle.