Please see Bugzilla report 17123 for a preamble to this problem. At Mark Rusk's (Dell Preferred Customer Support) direction, I rebuilt the kernel-2.2.14-6.1.1 RPM with lfs disabled. This resulted in a new RPM, kernel-2.2.14-6.0.1. I installed and booted the new kernel, then asked the Informix dba to re-run their installation procedure. The kernel paniced in the kvm subsystem, reporting "unable to swap". The customer has yet to give me permission to publish the kernel stack trace here. I will append it to this report as soon as I am given permission. On a hunch I disabled BIGMEM and rebuilt the kernel. Informix then installed without any additional (kernel) problems. Informix states they support any 2.2.x kernel. This is a misstatement. The additional features of the 6.2E distribution, specifically lfs and bigmem, are not compatible with Informix 9.2.x when using raw filesystems for data areas. Informix 9.2.x seems to work correctly with 6.2E and cooked (ext2fs) filesystems.
First of all, you want the 2.2.16-4 6.2E errata kernel update or the 2.2.16-3 6.2 errata kernel update that fix the known capabilities compromise. It's interesting to know that turning off BIGMEM caused this problem to go away, but without a decoded trace we have no real chance of fixing it. (Of course, there's even a possibility that this is fixed in our 2.2.16 kernels; you should use the non-enterprse 2.2.16-3 kernel since you can't use lfs.)
This was indeed fixed in 2.2.16-4.