Hi all,
A bit offtopic for this list, but this is the best place I could think of to discuss this.
A friend of mine had trouble with 2 different via c7 epia motherboards (mini itx boards with single chip chipset with unichrome integrated graphics) machines.
They would freeze (hard) pretty much at random while working in programs like openoffice or firefox. He end up writing a script which would repeatedly start firefox and thunderbird, wait for the cpu load to become zero, kill them again, etc. This killed the system reproducable, usually within the hour, always within 5 hours.
He gave one to me with the request to see if I could fix it. After many days of experimenting (latest bios update, try various settings, verify cooling, etc), I've found out that (on a fully up2date Fedora 7 system) replacing the i686 kernel with the i586 one and the glibc with the i386 (and openssl, but that wasn't used afaik) will make the system stable.
So appearantly the via c7 isn't all that i686 compatible as via claims, I suspect that there may be a problem with certain i686 specific synchronisation instructions, but that is just a hunge.
This leads to the conclusion, that anacondo should perhaps be modified to mark these systems as i586 and thus choose a i586 kernel and a i386 glibc when installing on them. But before filing a but I first wanted to discuss this here.
Regards,
Hans
Le Lun 27 août 2007 12:07, Hans de Goede a écrit :
Hi all,
A bit offtopic for this list, but this is the best place I could think of to discuss this.
...
So appearantly the via c7 isn't all that i686 compatible as via claims
As Alan will likely repeat, the glibc definition of i686 is not conformant with the Intel definition of i686. It includes instructions Intel declared optional, and Via does not implement. So a glibc i686 binary won't run on all the i686 processors on the market.
Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
Le Lun 27 août 2007 12:07, Hans de Goede a écrit :
Hi all,
A bit offtopic for this list, but this is the best place I could think of to discuss this.
...
So appearantly the via c7 isn't all that i686 compatible as via claims
As Alan will likely repeat, the glibc definition of i686 is not conformant with the Intel definition of i686. It includes instructions Intel declared optional, and Via does not implement. So a glibc i686 binary won't run on all the i686 processors on the market.
I know, but this is a via C7 (not a C3) which _does_ implement the instructions to match the rpm definition of i686 (which means it does implement cmov), but appearantly it doesn't implement them too well.
Regards,
Hans
kernel@lists.fedoraproject.org
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Hans de Goede -
Nicolas Mailhot