[WBEL-users] X problems with 2.4.26 kernel

[Kay Diederichs]

William Hooper wrote:
> Bevis.Peters@ftid.com said:
> 
>> I tried rebuilding the Intel 855 drivers from source, but no change. The
>> last line in the XFree.0.log it shows is: (II) I810(0): Primary V_BIOS
>> segment is: 0xc000 whereas the working version with the 2.4.21 kernel gets
>> past that to: (II) I810(0): VESA BIOS detected ...
>> 
>> 
>> unfortunately i'm somewhat out of my depth here.  I don't know how to find
>> out if my kernel has NPTL, or how to compile it in if it doesn't!
> 
> 
> If you got it from kernel.org and it is 2.4, it doesn't have NPTL.  You would
> have to do a lot of work to get Red Hat's NPTL patches to integrate.  I think
> it would be safe to argue that going to a 2.6 kernel would be easier.  At
> that point, though, you have to ask yourself if you really want WBEL or a
> more "leading edge" distro.
> 
> To ammend my first response, I meant to say that "another possiblity is
> NPTL", not the "only" other possiblity.  I do know that RHEL is heavily
> geared toward NPTL, so other things will most likely break even if you do get
> a kernel.org 2.4 kernel to work with X.
> 
> 

To use a vanilla 2.4 kernel (which does not support NPTL) with WBEL/RHEL only 
involves:

a) mv /lib/tls /lib/tls-dontuse  # this is essential for X
b) install the closed-source NVIDIA driver with --force-tls=classic

a) needs to be repeated after a glibc update, so you might want to exclude glibc
from being automatically updated by yum. I found b) to be necessary for k3b .

Been running a cluster of ~12 machines like that without any issues. (I use a 
vanilla kernel patched with Mosix, NFS, and ACPI_TIMER for Asus A7M266-D)

Kay