How do you interpret this message?

[jim1944]

When trying to boot the Fedora 8 live CD I get the following message:

This kernel requires the following features not present on the CPU:
0:15

What does this mean (in human terms please)? The computer has Fedora 7 installed and it boots fine.

All that I can figure out from my research is that the kernel does some feature checking prior to boot up. There is an 8 32-bit word array of features. What the message is saying is that the feature indicated by the 16th bit of the first word of this array is missing. But I can't find anything on the net to indicate what the bits in the array mean.

Any help wold be appreciated.

Thanks
Jim

[lazlow]

What cpu are you using?

[jim1944]

This isn't meant to be sarcastic or anything but why do you ask? I'm not looking for help in solving the problem. I'm looking for help in understanding the message.

FWIW: it's an old AMD 450 MHz. It's not my newest computer. It's not my oldest either. Anybody know where I can get a version of Linux to install on my TI-99A? (Please, don't answer that! If you did, I'd probably waste hours scrounging around my basement looking for it.)

Thanks
Jim

[lazlow]

Because anything older than a Pentium (or equivalent) is no longer supported (officially). There have been reports of older CPU still actually still working (amd in partiuclar) for whatever reason. I suspected that you may have been in that category as that would be my interpretation of the error message.

[markkuk]

The CPU feature bits are defined in include/asm-i386/cpufeature.h in the kernel source. 0:15 appears to be X86_FEATURE_CMOV (the CMOV instruction).

[sideways]

if you install F8 then you should install the i586 kernel, it probably won't do it by default so you'll have to do it manually after the install. The livecd doesn't have this kernel due to space constraints.

You may even need to compile a i386 target

Edit - a quick google check seems to indicate the cmov instruction came with i686 so i586 should be sufficient.

[jim1944]

Originally Posted by markkuk

The CPU feature bits are defined in include/asm-i386/cpufeature.h in the kernel source. 0:15 appears to be X86_FEATURE_CMOV (the CMOV instruction).

Ah, great. Thanks
Jim