From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.7 [en]C-NSCPCD (Win98; U) Description of problem: Dear Sir/Ma'am, Please reference my redhat online support ticket #219007 (sysreport attached). I have been working with one of your support technicians trying to determine the cause for the sluggish nature (every application within KDE takes forever to load) of RH 8.0 on my HP 6640C with an AMD K6 processor. He suggested that I turn this problem over to you. He discovered that there is conflicting indications about which processor is installed in the machine: Pentium III and AMD K6 are both indicated in different places. This suggests to me that there may be a problem with the autodetection routines on the RH 8.0 installation disks. Do you think performance would be effected if the kernel were configured for P-III, when in fact it's running on an AMD K6? I have experienced trouble with both RH 7.2 and RH 8.0 trying to install 386i- and 586i-configured RPMs. I've never suceeded in getting an Athlon-configured RPM to install. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot process consistently takes very long time to complete. The final step in loading KDE (reestablishing session) takes 2-3 minutes to complete. 2. 3. Additional info: I'm trying to attach the two files the online tech suggested you'd need, dmesg and cpuinfo.
Created attachment 87144 [details] Contents of /var/log/dmesg
Created attachment 87145 [details] Contents of /var/log/dmesg
Contents of second attachment are cpuinfo, not dmesg.
If an RPM is of type "athlon" it will not work on your system as the K6 series are as different as the Pentium and Pentium Pro processors. Are you sure your kernel is of type "i686" (which I believe is the highest level of CPU optimization that Red Hat enables for its packages)?
The athlon kernel won't work on a K6 processor. The installer did the right thing in which kernels it chose to install. Any slowness problems are kernel related
Regarding the comment from michael: It appears as though the kernel is configured for an i586 processor. I don't understand the basis of your question. I have not seen any indication that the kernel was configured for an i686 processor. Why did you ask? Regarding the comment from katzj: Great. The slowness being related to the kernel was the assumption I began this woeful process with. What insights can you provide about optimizing the configuration of the kernel? Why do i386-, i586-, and athlon-type RPMs fail so frequently in the install process? Clearly something in the configuration of the kernel is wrong or one of these RPM types would install most of the time.
the athlon and i686 kernel use cpu features present in Pentium II (and 3 and 4) and AMD Athlons that are not present in older cpu's. These kernels do not even boot on older cpu's; anaconda is smart enough to pick the optimimum one for your cpu. However the performance difference is in the order of 10% to 20%. Not 400%. How much memory do you have ?
Created attachment 87445 [details] tar file of sysreport
Response to question from arjanv: I have 325MB of memory. This data is contained in dmesg, which had been attached previously. Have you read the case history of ticket 219007? The technician I was working with couldn't determine from the information in sysreport whether my architecture was athlon or PIII. This suggests to me that there may be a problem with the way anaconda configured the kernel. Can you really just assume that anaconda is "smart enough"? How do you explain the fact that I can't get RPMs of type i386, i586 and athlon to install? Shouldn't one of these work consistently?
I haven't heard anything from Bugzilla since 5 December. Is this the extent of your support?
first of all bugzilla is not a support mechanism, but a defect reporting tool. as for your bug: could you 1) check that IDE DMA is on via hdparm 2) check /proc/mtrr to see if the mtrr info looks sane (when in doubt just attach it and I'll check)
Thanks for the bug report. However, Red Hat no longer maintains this version of the product. Please upgrade to the latest version and open a new bug if the problem persists. The Fedora Legacy project (http://fedoralegacy.org/) maintains some older releases, and if you believe this bug is interesting to them, please report the problem in the bug tracker at: http://bugzilla.fedora.us/