I've a CentOS-5.8 Linux installed on a server which has the Intel Xeon Sandy bridge 8 core, dual socket processor. As Sandybridge has AVX feature and can do 8 flops. But  we're not able to take performance boost of AVX , as this feature not supported on CentOS-5.8. 

          Is it possible to get AVX working, by just installing the CentOS-6.0 or 6.2 kernel on existing CentOS-5.8 OS, instead of doing re-installation with CentOS-6.2?

          We're even ready for compiling kernel source.

           Let us know what you suggest on this.

Thanks in advance