Core2 T2 and T3 strange crashes in MS Virtual PC

[Paul Pluzhnikov]

Greetings,

For reasons beyond my control, I must run FC inside Microsoft
Virtual PC 2004 (which is a PC emulator, similar to
VMWare Workstation).

This works fine for Core1, but in Core2 T2 and T3 I observe random
crashes in user-land executables (installation goes fine, and the
kernel doesn't appear to have any problems).

It appears that any executable may crash the first couple of times
it is run, e.g. (system booted into single-user mode):

sh-2.05b# ps
Segmentation fault
sh-2.05b# ps
Error, do this: mount -t proc none /proc
sh-2.05b# date
Segmentation fault
sh-2.05b# date
Sun May  9 09:18:22 PDT 2004

The executables will not crash when run under strace or gdb; they do
not leave a core (even with 'ulimit -c unlimited'), and I see no
kernel messages in any of the logs.

I though that perhaps the 2.6 kernel does something that makes
VPC unhappy, so I compiled 2.6.5 inside FC1 (inside VPC), and
booted that kernel (while using the rest of executables from FC1).
This did not show any problems.

Searching google for "Fedora Virtual PC" revealed that other people
run FC1, but I didn't find anything on FC2 under VPC.

Any clues on how to further diagnose this?

Thanks,