Fedora Core 6 common issues [LWN.net]

Fedora Core 6 common issues

Posted Oct 31, 2006 12:06 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: Fedora Core 6 common issues by proski
Parent article: Fedora Core 6 common issues

Everybody with particular types of i686 compatible hardware gets the i586 kernel, but the most serious _consequences_ are for those who have proprietary drivers, since the drivers will build against the wrong kernel image and don't work.

Another common effect is the lack of CPU-specific frequency scaling (on e.g. my Z60m) as listed in the article. This makes your laptop run hotter and reduces battery life until you switch to the correct kernel package.

It's particularly unfortunate because similar (identical?) bugs had been reported in earlier pre-releases, so this deserved better testing. However since it's not a fatal error (you get a working install from which you can fix it safely with one or two commands) I doubt there's any special reason for a re-spin.

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Fedora Core 6 common issues

Posted Oct 31, 2006 13:13 UTC (Tue) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

However, this problem is not fixable by "yum update" unless yum is changed to check the CPU and to load the best package for the given CPU even if the package has a different sub-architecture. Such behavior is not risk free in general, and it's possible that yum will need to be "hinted" or rather "hacked" for this specific problem with the kernel. Still, I'm not sure that anything like that will be done.