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Originally Posted by Grogan
Thanks, that confirms much of what I thought. I just didn't know for sure if there were other CPU types available. (Note that I'm coming from Linux where there are individual definitions for various processors.
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The Kernel CPU type is for the architecture of the machine (i386, hammer, ia64, ppc, etc). This is the broad, general architecture (instruction set) of the system. Internally, the individual source files will check for various functions of the underlying hardware and use what's best. FreeBSD tries to keep things simple, in that it gives you classes of features/drivers to enable, and then auto-detects the specifics as needed (compare ATA subsystems - FreeBSD: device ata vs. Linux: several pages of individual chipsets to select from)
You can set the exact CPU type in the machine via /etc/make.conf and that will enable different features in the software you install via the ports tree or when compiling the world or kernel. See /usr/share/examples/etc/make.conf for all the details. This sets all the gcc options like -m -cpu and so forth.