🚀 go-pugleaf

"Aragorn", thou legless lecherous. Like the toad, ugly and venomous. Ye
tehee'd:

> On Sunday 17 January 2010 07:59 in alt.os.linux, somebody identifying as
> Yousuf Khan wrote...
> 
>> AZ Nomad wrote:
>>
>>> On Sat, 16 Jan 2010 12:03:35 -0500, Yousuf Khan
>>> <bbbl67@spammenot.yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Just purchased a new motherboard/chipset and processor for my
>>>> desktop. Haven't switched them out yet, waiting to see what
>>>> preparations I need to take on Ubuntu before going for it? I'll be
>>>> keeping the existing hard drives and video card, as is.
>>> 
>>> ubuntu isn't a microsoft product;  there's no code to disable the
>>> system after a hardware cange.
>> 
>> More worried about drivers. The motherboard will be going from Nvidia
>> chipset to ATI chipset. Onboard video will change likewise, but
>> discrete graphics will remain Nvidia 8600GT.
> 
> Stock distribution kernels are always built without processor- or
> chipset-specific optimizations.  They contain generic code that will
> work on all processors or motherboard chipsets of that particular market
> segment.  By this I mean the type of distribution you are installing,
> i.e. IA32 (alias x86, x86-32 or i586 (or perhaps i686)) or AMD64 (alias
> x86-64).
> 
> The idea behind a binary GNU/Linux distribution is that it would be
> compatible with as much of the hardware as possible for that particular
> platform - e.g. AMD64 - without getting into any optimizations specific
> for Intel or AMD, or chipset optimizations.  All chipsets and processors
> for the x86 platform processors understand generic x86 instructions, and
> in some cases the Linux kernel can pick a subset of (slightly) more
> optimized instructions specific to a given chipset by autodetecting what
> is there.
> 
> Processor and chipset support is built into the kernel itself - i.e.
> statically linked - as well as some very common peripheral support -
> e.g. generic PATA and SATA support and ext3 filesystem support - but
> support for other peripherals (like videocards) is loaded via driver
> modules.  These driver modules are usually all included in the /initrd/
> image, and for some, the kernel will autodetect which one to load, while
> others are being loaded with prejudice, regardless of whether the
> hardware supported by those modules is present or not.
> 
> For instance, the stock PCLinuxOS kernel I'm using on this machine here
> loads many different types of network adapter modules, of which only two
> actually have the hardware present in the system - one being an on-board
> connector, the other being a PCI plug-in card.
> 
> My advice however would be to disable your on-board video adapter in the
> BIOS, because nVidia drivers don't work well with two different types of
> video adapters in your system.
> 
> The bottom line is that the only variable that seems to exist between
> both your old and your new system is that the motherboard and CPU are
> different, and those differences will be handled by the Linux kernel
> itself through its built-in generic support for just about every chipset
> and CPU with the exception of bleeding edge stuff[1] and by the /initrd/
> via all the driver modules it contains.  The proprietary nVidia driver
> will be working with the same video adapter card, so that should not be
> a problem either.  Things that require a proprietary driver module might
> not be supported, though.  This depends on your distribution and whether
> it includes proprietary drivers or not.
> 
> 
> [1] If the chipset is too new for the kernel, then it'll still be
>     supported for essential functionality, but then some optional things
>     might not be correctly detected, e.g. certain hardware monitoring
>     functions or the likes.

Translation: Linux is always compiled for the absolute lowest common 
denominator. If your processor is a 1985 386-SX, Linux is guaranteed to 
run on it.