[PlanetCCRMA] OT: FC5/6 on AMD K-6 500Mhz

Tue May 1 16:03:20 2007

On Tue, 2007-05-01 at 18:16 +0100, Ken Smith wrote:
> Please accept my apologies in advance for this OT post. I'm a happy FC5 
> CCRMA user with another problem. My local LUG's e-mail server is down 
> ;-( otherwise I'd ask there, and I know there is a solid body of good 
> RH/FC Linux knowledge here.
> 
> I'm setting up a test system on an old box with a AMD 500Mhz K6 CPU & 
> 512m of memory. I'd like to get it to FC5 or 6 to do my testing. One of 
> the things I'd like to try is NetJack.
> 
> It runs FC4 fine. The installer for FC5 & 6 crashes in the package 
> selection process on either a clean install or an upgrade install. I 
> tried a Yum FC4 -> FC5 upgrade from the repository and Yum segfaults, 
> but not always in the same place. Once it got all the way to building 
> the transaction to do the upgrade and then segfaulted. Sometimes I get 
> Python error messages. The machine passes memtest86. Yumex does similar 
> although sometimes it gives an "illegal instruction" error. The machine 
> has an i586 kernel. Is the FC5 RPM build of Python i586 friendly?

It smells to me like something wrong in the hardware. If it had not
passed memtest86 I'd say it is bad memory (but memtest86 in fallible as
well). Specially suspicious is that it not always fails in the same
place, it should be repeatable. 

> Interestingly when booting the FC6 Live CD it crashes on the 
> "Uncompressing Linux" stage during the boot. No error message - it just 
> returns to the BIOS. It does the same if I boot a hard disk with an FC6 
> system installed via another box.  (Possibly because there is a i686 
> kernel there). 

Yes, most possibly that's the reason. 

> It runs Knoppix with a 2.6.14 kernel without problems.
> 
> Is the K6 CPU really i586 class? I've switched off the CPU's internal 
> cache as suggested in a hardware compatibility guide I read.

I'm not 100% sure but I think a K6 should boot a i586 kernel. 

I just install fc6 on a PIII machine with no problems (at least major). 
-- Fernando