Bryan J. Smith <b.j.smith@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Pre-i686 (PPro-P4, K6/Athlon, Cyrix M2/C3, WinChip2?) architectures take issue some applications.
> E.g., Red Hat, among other distros, have not bothered with pre-i686 NPTL support.
> There are better distros for i486 (K5, Cyrix Mx/M1, WinChip) or i586 (exactly Pentium-only)
> architectures than anything Fedora Core based (RHEL), SuSE Linux based (SLES/NOES),
> Mandrake Linux or similarly based.
This was true for Fedora Core 2, and only handfull of packages were
affected with the problem. The problem was that db libraries were
compiled with NPTL, and some programs linked against the db library
failed to work correctly because of that (cyrus-imapd seems to be the
most problematic one).
The Apache web server was not affected by this problem, at least not in
simple/default configuration.
The i386 glibc package on Core 3 should have NPTL support (it isn't i386
clean anymore, since for NPTL support it needs to include at least i486
instructions, however it is still labeled as i386 for some reason). If
this updated glibc package is part of RHEL4, than everything should work
correctly on i586 machines.
Since the kernel is the only i586/i686 package in RHEL4 , and the rest
of the system uses i386 instructions (apart from glibc that uses i486 to
implement NPTL, if they did same hack as on FC3), the distribution
should work on i486 too with custom compiled kernel.
--
Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic@xxxxxx> Pollard Banknote Limited
Systems Administrator 1499 Buffalo Place
Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276 Winnipeg, MB R3T 1L7
