# Does FreeBSD-RELEASE 9.1 support AMD K6-II?



## c083d4 (Aug 26, 2013)

Someone wants to sell me an AMD K6-2 with 128mb MB of ram RAM and a 8 gb GB hard disk, but before deciding if I want it or not I need to know if the latest FreeBSD release works on that hardware. I also want to know if I should install the amd64 version or the i386 one.
Thanks.


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## wblock@ (Aug 26, 2013)

Yes, it should work, but unless that's an unusual machine, it should be free.  It will be i386 only.


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## vermaden (Aug 26, 2013)

Yes, I have run FreeBSD on an AMD K6-II system.


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## ondra_knezour (Aug 26, 2013)

I learned to try the hardware notes for such questions at first.



> All i386-compatible AMD processors are also supported, including [...] AMD-K6Â® (and variants)


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## c083d4 (Aug 28, 2013)

ondra_knezour said:
			
		

> I learned to try the hardware notes for such questions at first.


I looked for hardware.txt, couldn't find it.


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## User23 (Aug 29, 2013)

You can set the K6-2 as CPUTYPE in /etc/make.conf and build the system. Maybe this helps to get "more" performance out of it.


```
less /usr/share/examples/etc/make.conf

...
# The CPUTYPE variable controls which processor should be targeted for
# generated code.  This controls processor-specific optimizations in
# certain code (currently only OpenSSL) as well as modifying the value
# of CFLAGS to contain the appropriate optimization directive to gcc.
# The automatic setting of CFLAGS may be overridden using the
# NO_CPU_CFLAGS variable below.
# Currently the following CPU types are recognized:
#   Intel x86 architecture:
#       (AMD CPUs)      opteron-sse3 opteron athlon64-sse3 athlon64 athlon-mp
#                       athlon-xp athlon-4 athlon-tbird athlon k8-sse3 k8
#                       geode k6-3 k6-2 k6 k5

CPUTYPE?=k6-2
```


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## vermaden (Aug 29, 2013)

User23 said:
			
		

> You can set the K6-2 as CPUTYPE in /etc/make.conf and build the system.
> Maybe this help to get "more" performance out of it.



With current CPUs being very fast its more or less pointless to rebuild everything with these optimizations, it will be fast anyway.

With such slow CPUs as AMD K6-II even building kernel/base system/ports with that flag everything will still be very slow


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