Need to use i586 kernel and i386 glibc for via c7 epia system

[Hans de Goede]

Hi all,

A bit offtopic for this list, but this is the best place I could think of to 
discuss this.

A friend of mine had trouble with 2 different via c7 epia motherboards (mini 
itx boards with single chip chipset with unichrome integrated graphics) machines.

They would freeze (hard) pretty much at random while working in programs like 
openoffice or firefox. He end up writing a script which would repeatedly start 
firefox and thunderbird, wait for the cpu load to become zero, kill them again, 
etc. This killed the system reproducable, usually within the hour, always 
within 5 hours.

He gave one to me with the request to see if I could fix it. After many days of 
experimenting (latest bios update, try various settings, verify cooling, etc), 
I've found out that (on a fully up2date Fedora 7 system) replacing the i686 
kernel with the i586 one and the glibc with the i386 (and openssl, but that 
wasn't used afaik) will make the system stable.

So appearantly the via c7 isn't all that i686 compatible as via claims, I 
suspect that there may be a problem with certain i686 specific synchronisation 
instructions, but that is just a hunge.

This leads to the conclusion, that anacondo should perhaps be modified to mark 
these systems as i586 and thus choose a i586 kernel and a i386 glibc when 
installing on them. But before filing a but I first wanted to discuss this here.

Regards,

Hans