[CentOS] CentOS 2.1 on i586

[Johnny Hughes]

On Mon, 2006-10-16 at 13:20 +0200, Dag Wieers wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Oct 2006, John Newbigin wrote:
> 
> > Aleksandar Milivojevic wrote:
> > > I've just attempted to reinstall my ancient laptop that has Pentium MMX
> > > processor.  Since it is ancient, I've decided to go with CentOS 2.1. Got
> > > stuck, installer claims I need at least i686.  Hmmm...  I know that 3.8 and
> > > 4.4 work without a glitch on i586, so this came as surprise.  I even thing
> > > original RHEL2.1 might had support for i586 too (but I might be wrong).
> > > 
> > > Anyhow, what happened with i586 in CentOS 2.1?
> >
> > Although i386 kernel & glibc are provided, you can not install onto anything
> > less than i686.  You will have to attach the disk to something newer to do the
> > install, downgrade the kernel, libc & openssl and then you should be able to
> > stick the disk back into the 586.
> > 
> > Be aware that there may be some i686 instructions in the i386 packages.  This
> > is due to packaging and compiler bugs but they are treated as WONTFIX by RH
> > because their minimum supported arch is i686.  You should be OK, just don't
> > bet the house on it.
> 
> What exactly is causing anything lower than i686 to fail ? If it is 
> anaconda, CentOS could patch it slightly. If it is the kernel, we could 
> build a i386 one ?
> 
> Not sure if we want to do this. What are the arguments for and against 
> this ? I do see some benefit to have RHEL2.1 and even RHEL3 to work on < i686.

We did rebuild CentOS-3 and CentOS-4 to do this.  Where they were
concerned, it was just supplying i586 based kernels that get installed
via anaconda.

Since the code (from FedoraCore) that was already in anaconda was still
there, that was all that was required.  There were quite a bit more
changes required in anaconda to support BOOTING with either the i586 or
i686 kernel for CentOS-4 (that was not required to be looked at on
CentOS-3 as it boots an i386 kernel for install by design).

However, CentOS-2 is now really in maintenance mode (no changes except
security changes) ... so I would not recommend changing it now.

You can use CentOS-3 or CentOS-4 on an i586 processor ... I would
recommend CentOS-3 if your memory is < 256mb.

Thanks,
Johnny Hughes


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