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Up until recently, Debian users needed to understand various chip-specific flavours within each architecture. For instance -486, -k7, -k7-smp, -686, -686-smp, etc. were all under the i386 architecture (The 32bit AMD/Intel compatible architecture) and -amd64-k8, -amd64-k8-smp, em64t-p4, etc. were all under the amd64 architecture (The 64bit AMD/Intel architecture).

Recently the chip specific versions have been merging to common binary images with module component for chip-specific hardware and smp options. One binary flavour, the -k7, still exists separately suggesting some optimizations require separate binaries and cannot be rolled up into a common binary package.

This was fine until recently there was no longer an AMD-K7 specific flavour of the Debian Xen Linux System. For now, it appears all current 32bit AMD/Intel processors should run on the ‘686′ flavour and all current AMD/Intel 64bit processors continue to run on the ‘amd64′ flavour. Why there is not a transitional package, used to map the K7 upgrades to the 686 binaries must be due to the focus on Etch release. Since there is no Xen-K7 in Sarge, official transition is not required. Unfortunately for Debian K7 users, Xen has been stable and available for some time and many Etch deployments will face the unofficial manual transition from -k7 to -686. In any event, the lack of communication on this as indicated in Bug 405187 is a bit unusual. One interesting note is that linux-image-2.6-k7 is alive and well, suggesting it is no easy task to merge xen-linux-686 with the linux-image-k7 optimizations. For now, an AthlonXP user will have a -k7 image for non-xen usage, and a -686 image for xen usage. It just does not seem to be sound logic. Certainly it should all be resolved for the Etch release.