All you have to know about RPM

by Alexandre de Abreu

How can I figure out the Kernel version(smp, bigmem) and base arch(i386, athlon)?

When upgrading or installing a new Kernel version from a RPM package, there are some points you need to pay attention: the arch type and the Kernel name/version. See Kernel upgrade notes for more details on upgrading commands.

To obtain these values from your installed and current Kernel issue the command:

rpm -q --qf "Kernel arch type is: %{ARCH}\nKernel name is: %{VERSION}\n" kernel

These are some RPM macros, see this for more details. With these values it's easy to know what Kernel is good for you when upgrading or installing new versions of RPM kernel packages. The usually names are "smp" for multi-processor machines, "bigmem" when compiled with more than 4 Gigabyte of memory support and "i386", "i586", "i686" and "athlon" for arch types.