Star Earlier Report a Fake, 10.6.2 Still Doesn't Support Atom
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 9th Nov 2009 00:59 UTC
Mac OS X Despite reports to the contrary, current Mac OS X 10.6.2 Snow Leopard builds do not support the Intel Atom processor. The report that support had returned is a fake, and the most recent build 10C540 still does not support the Atom processor. C'est tout.
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lemur2
Member since:
2007-02-17

What are you talking about? I can't speak for Ubuntu, but I ran Slackware and Arch on some of the first Atom machines and there wasn't any recompiling needed except some driver modules to support some of the netbook hardware. Also, if you didn't notice, vanilla Windows XP/Vista/7 all run as well and you can't tell me they've just happened to be using a special compiler flag all this time. Methinks maybe you are confusing Atom with some other chip?


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_atom#Architecture

Hmmm, I think I may have not thought this through properly.

When I first got a machine with an Atom CPU, I tried it with several liveCDs. They all went into a "kernel panic" and wouldn't boot. It wasn't until a few months later when the next round of Linux distribution releases occurred that suddenly all of the new liveCDs being released would boot.

Then came this article, with its observation that it was quite possible to produce an OS that would run on x86 but not Atom.

I just assumed that Atom must lack some normally-assumed CPU extensions, I suppose.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86#Extensions

But perhaps not. It is quite possible that all of the observations about x86 OSes not booting on Atom can be simply explained by a lack of drivers required by the kernel.

Most Linux distributions ran just fine on the original Atom netbooks. They are x86-compatible CPUs after all. However, there were no drivers for the chipsets that came with the CPUs. Thus, you couldn't use them to their fullest (no wireless, no graphics accel, etc). But the CPUs themselves were compatible.

I've had Debian Etch, and Kubuntu 8.04/8.10/9.04 running on Asus netbooks using Atom CPUs. The install ran just fine. What I could do after the install depended on the OS version, as some had drivers while others didn'.


Not my experience. I got kernel panics for a few months after my first purchase of an Atom CPU, until the various Linux distribution maintainers caught up.

Edited 2009-11-09 22:48 UTC

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