Re: RedHat9 and my Cyrix-chip machine conflict (?)

[Bob McClure Jr <robertmcclure earthlink net>]

On Thu, Oct 09, 2003 at 11:29:50PM -0700, David Morgan wrote:
> I posted a problem here related to a RedHat version 8-to-9 upgrade 
> attempt, but my problem proves to have nothing to do with the upgrade as 
> such but seems to be some more generic, fundamental incompatibility 
> between my machine and version 9 of RedHat. Before I decide to abandon 
> the attempt to put RedHat 9 on this machine, any feedback on my theory 
> about the problem would be useful.
> 
> The symptom: a straightforward, from scratch, plain vanilla installation 
> of RedHat 9 completes successfully. But at boot time, when vmlinuz tries 
> to run I get streaming screenfulls of messages something like:
> 
> [<c010c1b47>] handle_vm86_fault [kernel] 0x4b4 (0xc1b4c00e)
> 
> My 4-5 year old emachine has a Cyrix chip in it. The installed vmlinuz 
> kernel image file came out of the "i686" rpm (there is also an "i586" 
> rpm on the CD). I believe Intel expands the machine language instruction 
> set for its chips with successive generations, each being a superset of 
> the previous. And "i686" means latest, or at least later set than 
> "i586." I thought the Cyrix (Pentium workalike) might not support the 
> i686 instructions. However I see that the RedHat 8-- which runs just 
> fine-- also came from "i686" rpms on the RedHat 8 CDs.
> 
> Could the RedHat 9 CD's "i686" rpm's vmlinuz indulge deeper into the 
> instruction set and contain machine instructions that weren't in RedHat 
> 8's "i686" vmlinuz, and are unsupported by the Cyrix CPU? Long shot 
> explanation but I'm out of gas and ready to concede I need a different 
> machine unless some revelation appears. Any ideas, please let me know. 
> Thanks.

I have an old Cyrix MII machine as my firewall.  I believe it is
correctly regarded as an i686.  I've not had any problem with it.

Cheers,
-- 
Bob McClure, Jr.             Bobcat Open Systems, Inc.
robertmcclure earthlink net  http://www.bobcatos.com
You may need to lose everything to find out that
   God is all you need.