[CentOS] Anyone using CentOS 6 on PC104 stacks?

Thu Jul 24 13:45:16 UTC 2014
Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>

On 07/23/2014 04:06 PM, Denniston, Todd A CIV NAVSURFWARCENDIV Crane wrote:
> ...
> As for the VL-EPMs-21b, even though it worked OK in CentOS 5.9, it would always stop in the UDEV
> startup of CentOS 6.5 even after updating to the latest 6.5 kernel and using the above kernel options. Interestingly though while working with it, I noticed a little brown cube on the ESD bench where the
> board had been setting.  Who would think that a missing capacitor might stop a new kernel,
>   with a much faster IO engine, from accessing all the hardware in parallel (max power pull) at
> entry into user space? :)
> Beginning to think this one is not CentOS's fault. :)
> Fortunately I am expecting to get a new, not used before I got it, version ... sometime. :)
>
> So I guess it is sort of solved for now.
> Thanks for taking  a look.
> -----
> Drive (320GB) used in both settings
> WD3200BEVE
> 500M boot
> 1GB swap
> minimal install, and using chroot in rescue, added: sos, pciutils, usbutils, ntpdate,  openssh-clients,
> dmidecode, lynx
> -----
> CPU card #1
> Versa Logic Corp (Ocelot)
> VL-EPMs-21b
> http://www.versalogic.com/oce
> Intel Atom Z520, 1.33 GHz

I would have thought this one would have worked, but a missing cap might 
cause that failure.  I have seen cap failures do strange things like 
this; once I was troubleshooting a radio station automation computer 
that passed POST and several diags but would hang going into Windows XP 
(it hung going into a liveCD of a Linux distribution, too, so it wasn't 
Windows' fault).  I asked the DJ if anything unusual had happened when 
it first locked-up, to which she said, 'well, not really, except that 
gunshot I heard.'  Turned out a capacitor had shot its casing with 
enough force that it dented the steel case cover; but the machine would 
run fine until enough power was being drawn to shut down the 
regulators.  Again note that this machine not only passed POST but also 
memtest86.

> ----
> CPU card #2
> RTD cme37786hx
> http://www.rtd.com/manuals/archive/archive.htm
> http://www.rtd.com/manuals/archive/CME37786HX.pdf  pdf page 14 has specs.
> VIA Eden CPU with Twister-T Chipset, 400 MHz to 1 GHz clock speed
>
The VIA Eden isn't officially support, but yours appears to have cmov, 
which is the usual problem with them and CentOS 5+.

I haven't personally tried an ISA-capable motherboard in a while with 
any modern CentOS......