[CentOS-devel] Status of CentOS 5 for the i586?

Tue Jun 7 21:15:03 UTC 2011
Cody Jackson <supertanker13 at gmail.com>

I just had a look at the rhel6 kernel source, and it looks like this
is going to be troublesome for i586 support. It generates
configuration files on the fly (?) and doesn't include an i586 config
file by default--defunct or not. I imagine, but don't know for
certain, that the preapplied patches may make things difficult too. I
hope someone more familiar with the kernel than I can look into this
and tell me I'm wrong, but until then, I'll be focusing my efforts on
C5.

So far, the C5 kernel builds (and runs) and I made a "shotgun patch"
to remove -ffast-math from the mesa packages, which builds fine.
Before I play around more with Mesa I hope to test and see if the i586
actually dislikes -ffast-math or not, which might mean popping out the
AMD K6 and testing with a genuine Pentium. The other possibly
troublesome package is procps, which also uses -ffast-math. It'd be
great if we could verify that -ffast-math actually plays nice on i586
equipment.

After getting the packages playing nice, I'll see about getting a
build script together. It'd be nice to be able to automate these
builds this without messing with the original srpm, although to pass
things to mock it looks like the srpm has to be extracted, two files
munged, the srpm repacked and then handed to mock.

Again, for those of you wondering why I'm scratching my head over
-ffast-math, I'm going by information on this wiki page, which I
haven't been able to test yet:
http://wiki.centos.org/Projects/CentOS5PentiumSupport

Cheers,
Cody Jackson