Can't install Fedora 13 on AMD K6-2: cmov not present

[Chemtox]

Howdy.

I recently built a few boxes from old scraps, figuring I would give those good ol' K6-2s a second chance with Fedora. I didn't got far though. On booting the install CD, the kernel will spit immediately after loading:

"this kernel requires the following features not present on the CPU: cmov"

I've tried with the Live CD I already had, and on seeing it's marked as i686 on the download page, I also tried with the normal "i386" non-live install, with the same result.

I can boot Knoppix just fine, so I'm guessing what I want is a Fedora install with a kernel not optimized for i686. Does such thing exists? Probably not, unless I get an old release. But which one? And should I be able to update to fresh versions? Or what alternate methods of installing could I use?

Any ideas welcome.

[CiaW]

I have an old amd k6 with very low ram that I have set up as a print server. I tried booting Fedora 7 and got the same message, so I suspect there isn't any recent'ish Fedora that will run on it. I now have Vector linux installed on it, which is a lightweight gui derived from slackware.

Linux Mint 8 also booted up on the machine, but due to the low ram it was pretty awful. Puppy also booted on it, and if I get ambitious I may see if I can add a puppy boot to the lilo bootloader, but I don't use it that often and it's doing fine with Vector.

[SiliconSlick]

The AMD K6-2 is considered a i586 series processor, not i686. Support for i586 was dropped in Fedora 12 so your best bet is either Fedora 11 or another distro that supports i586 (unless someone has happened to make an i586 Fedora 13 respin). See:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/F12X86Support
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Talk:F.../F12X86Support

SS

[Chemtox]

Strange... Google barely found 30 hits with that message, so I didn't expect it to appear in a distro as old as Fedora 7. Most of the hits are related to backup live CDs too, which is the strangest thing of all: people make backups!?!?

One of my main interests was to get Sugar in the old boxes, amongst other educative software, and throw it at kids, or rather, the other way. :P The spartan requirements of Sugar seemingly made it a perfect choice for old systems, and Fedora is the "official" Sugar distro, so I'd still like to stick to it...

A'ight, M-x, sleuth-mode, <RET>
...
C-h, m
:P

CMOV, or conditional move instructions, were first introduced by Intel in it's Pentium Pro line. They "check the state of the status flags in the EFLAGS register and perform a move operation if the flags are in a specified state (or condition). These instructions can be used to move a 16- or 32-bit value from memory to a general-purpose register or from one general-purpose register to another. [...] The CMOVcc instructions are useful for optimizing small IF constructions. They also help eliminate branching overhead for IF statements and the possibility of branch mispredictions by the processor." [Intel Architecture Software Developer's Manual, Volume 1: Basic Architecture] Cool.

More interesting for the matter at hand, "These instructions may not be supported on some processors in the Pentium® Pro processor family. Software can check if the CMOV instructions are supported by checking the processor’s feature information with the CPUID instruction".

This enlightening thread suggests that CMOV was widely adopted for it's performance benefits, and the diminishing users of 586 CPUs were relegated to oblivion, and even worse, 686 CPUs without CMOV were simply left to dump cores or even more obscure errors (like Anaconda in Fedora 8), until finally someone added a check to identify them as i586 in the kernel.

Hmmm, the nail in the coffin, Fedora 12 officially dropped support for anything without CMOV (SiliconSlick's link is more juicy). That means I couldn't run *any* official packages --not just the kernel-- from F12 or 13 without CMOV, right?

Looking for an i586 respin doesn't looks too good either.

I tried booting into the Fedora 11 install, and it looked fine. I even found Dextrose, a back-port of Sugar 0.88 to F11, so that's an option. But running an old release with back-ports that probably will require special handling is far from ideal, so for now I installed Debian, which honoring it's motto is installing without troubles, other than a few hiccups with the last versions of the rt1839 driver (which had enough quirks already...).

Thanks for the replies.

[velikj]

Even if F11 works on this system, it is no longer supported by the Fedora project, due to their rapid release schedule and short support time. Because of this, I installed Debian Lenny stable instead.

Ubuntu through 10.04 will work, but rumor has it that they will soon go the same route - pulling support of even 686s without the CMOV instruction, like the VIA C3. But 10.04 is a LTS version, so it still has many months of support.

[stevea]

Try searching for another distro at
http://distrowatch.com/search.php

Scroll down and select the architectures and the distro features you want then ...

[RJ Stiles]

I realize that this is an old thread, but for those stumbling across it looking for answers--like I did--my findings may be helpful. For those with children and old, unused computers, I would suggest checking out DoudouLinux. It is built on Debian, so it has pretty lean requirements.

I have used the Remastersys method (hxxp://blog.doudoulinux.org/post/2011/04/09/Clean-install-of-DoudouLinux-on-hard-disk) to do a HDD install on pretty ancient hardware (266MHz i586 CPU, 96MB RAM). Running the LiveCD was painfully slow (19 minutes to boot), but this installation is reasonably snappy (4 minutes to boot). I had tried the Debian install method (hxxp://blog.doudoulinux.org/post/2012/02/28/Using-Debian-to-install-DoudouLinux), but could not get the system to boot after installation.

I do have a few tips for this Remastersys method:

1) See the “Installing DoudouLinux definitively” page for general information, including accessing console (hxxp://www.doudoulinux.org/web/english/documentation-7/advanced-tools/article/installing-doudoulinux.html).

2) The Lenny repositories have been archived, so the following lines need to be added after registering the remastersys repository:

a. echo ‘deb hxxp://archive.debian.org/debian/ lenny main non-free contrib’ >> $SOURCESLIST

b. echo ‘deb hxxp://archive.debian.org/debian-security lenny/updates main non-free contrib’ >> $SOURCESLIST

3) The standard i686 release would not support my CPU, but the i486 release worked fine (hxxp://download.doudoulinux.org/dailybuild/).

4) The computer that is currently running DoudouLinux did not have enough RAM to download all the updates to memory to perform the installation. I had to stick the HDD in a system with ample RAM to perform the installation and then replace it in the old system.

5) After the HDD install, my monitor was detected at a very low resolution. Removing resolution limits solved the problem (hxxp://www.doudoulinux.org/spip/english/documentation-7/configuration-14/article/screen-settings#4).

6) The hardware detection at boot only appears to look for PCI sound cards. My ISA sound card was not automatically detected, but could be found by executing “alsaconf” as root. Executing “modprobe sb io=0x220 irq=5 dma16=5 mpu_io=0x330” as root enables sound in some contexts but not others. Anybody have any other ideas?

After DoudouLinux gets updated to the latest version of Debian, I am planning to play around with either a full Sugar install (hxxp://wiki.debian.org/Sugar) or a Sugar via Sweets install (hxxp://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Platform_Team/Guide/Sugar_via_Sweets).

(Replace hxxp with http.)