i386-class support changed in F-13?

[Peter Robinson]

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 4:52 AM, Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 01, 2010 at 22:43:25 +0200,
>  Gland Vador <glandvador at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> On 05.04.2010 14:48, Dan Horák wrote:
>> >
>> > I was trying to install i686 variant of F-13 to an Alix board (2D13 with
>> > Geode LX) and got into troubles. The kernel boots fine, but when it
>> > should start initramfs the kernel panics. Everything works well when
>> > using complete F-12 environment and when using F-12 kernel+initramfs
>> > with F-13 rootfs the initramfs stuff runs well, but when I try to
>> > manually chroot into the F-13 from the dracut shell I get an "Invalid
>> > instruction" exception. I though last change in x86 CPU support was in
>> > F-12 (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/F12X86Support) and it
>> > explicitly talks about Geode LX as still supported. So the question is
>> > whether F-13 should still work on Geode LX?
>> >
>>
>> Sorry to reopen this old topic, but the conclusion is not obvious. The
>> F13 is out and it seems to have lost support for the Geode LX CPU
>> (cf.http://sharkcz.livejournal.com/5708.html), due to the use of the
>> NOPL instruction by GCC.
>>
>> Will this CPU be supported during F13 and above or should I search for a
>> new distribution ?
>
> I don't believe there was any intentional change in supported CPUs for F13.
> If it was supposed to work in F12, I think it is supposed to work in F13.
> Did you file a bug against gcc?

It does work in F-12, the response for the lack of support in F-13 was
'deal with it'. There is suppose to be a patch to emulate it in the
kernel but apparently it won't go upstream until its a generic infra
patch that can allow support of other emulated bits in other cpus in a
generic way. So its possible it will come back, but I don't hold up
hope of a quick resolution. Which leaves us in a big predicament as to
how we're going to support the 1.5 million odd XO-1s out there moving
forward.

Peter