Package: linux-image-2.6-486 Version: 2.6.26+16 Severity: wishlist It would be useul to have the facility to provide a generic entry in /proc/cpuinfo rather than revealing processor specific information. This could possibly be done via a boot option, such as cpuinfo=486 or cpuinfo=pentium This would enable the computer to act as a generic _base_ level computer for a specific architecture, providing backward compatibility with lower level machines. This would enable a machine to appear as a generic 486 machine or as a generic Pentium machine, without revealing the machine is actually a higher level machine 686 machine (or using an IBM compatible processor, supplied by an alternative manufacturer such as a Cyrix 686, or an AMD K6 or AMD K7.) One of the problems that I am encountering is that build and runtime systems appear to be taking information from /proc/cpuinfo, and this is influencing compiler or program behaviour. All of my machines are using 486 (IA-32) compatible processors. However, not all machines are true 486 machines. I have 586, 686 and K7 series processors on some machines, and the processors are made by various manufacturers (such as Intel, Cyrix and AMD.) I require all machines to behave with lowest common denominator behaviour, and for all compiled binaries to be generic enough to move across machines. I am finding that distribution provided binaries, and third party provided build _script_s are detecting that the machine doing the build is a 686, and is utilizing features for that architecture, even though the target architecture is generic 486. I know that a workaround for this would be to modify all of the build _script_s in every single package, and find a way of rebuilding the entire Debian distribution from source, but I feel that a falsified /proc/cpuinfo would be much less of a headache. I propose that the boot time switch cpuinfo=pentium provides the following falsified information in /proc/cpuinfo: vendor_id       : GenuineIntel cpu family      : 5 model           : 2 model name      : Pentium 75 - 200 Maybe the vendor_id, model and model name could be simply be set to Unknown or Generic if the boot switch is used. I am not sure what effect this would have, but hopefully it would mean generic behaviour.