Yesterday's post on the K6 covered getting a CentOS 4.8 beta candidate installed on ancient hardware; The careful reader may have noticed that I had an unexplained list item early on in that outline:
Add to /etc/yum.confexclude=kernel*
This is not something that just occurred to me unbidden, but rather came from an awareness that the upstream has had the dreaded 'Regression' from time to time in its RHEL 4 series, where a patch needed to support the K6/i586 architecture was not consistently present. In reading the bug comment notes, it seems that the 'boneyard' available to the member of the kernel testing team tasked with this is not so full of carcasses as mine, and so he cannot test his fixes as well
So, I took affirmative steps to preemptively 'partition away' the need for an updated working kernel from our 4.8 beta install candidate, and yet be able to get to a working chassis with the kernel from the 4.5 final image, which is known to work. Good thing. The regression is back in the 4.8 kernel SRPMs, and the needed patch got dropped, it seems (this from an initial workup -- detail testing will be needed to see)
The workaround is straightforward; Akemi 'toracat' Yagi maintains a testing 'plus' archive, containing kernels with the needed patch, and I can confirm that her candidate works fine. see: http://centos.toracat.org/kernel/centos4/centosplus-testing/i386/
Thanks, toracat
