Thank you for your feedback.
Unfortunately the manufacturer of our application software will only support it on RHEL/CentOS 7.0. I have asked and that is all they say. When the CentOS 7.0 boots it does not recognise the CPU ID, flags it as a soft error then continues. The Haswell and the Ice Lake both have 28 cores but different frequencies. A couple of clues. At the boot prompt the server cooling fans are running slowly. When it hangs, after a short delay, the fans run faster and this is repeated. Also, when it hangs the keyboard is unresponsive and the server status LED's state that all is okay. If Intel adhere to the x86_64 standard for their processors then surely the only difference would be the addition functionality. I am trying to find a resolution as this particular application is perfect for our requirements. Mark
But, if you only install the newer kernel, does your application work on it? If so, why not just run it that way?
Apart from that, you could install a current distribution on the host and then let the application server run in a KVM instance. That way you can fine tune what kind of CPU/features are provided to the VM.
Regards, Simon