[A small little survey]

[David Vos]

On Thu, 21 Jun 2001, Chris Black wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 21, 2001 at 12:39:09PM -0400, Joey Raheb wrote:
>  > No problems with the setup, only thing with AMDs you have to append the
> > following to the lilo.conf append="x86_serial_nr=1" that was the trickiest
> > thing we encountered. 
> So, why was the "x86_serial_nr=1" kernel option required for AMDs?
> What does it do?

The Pentium III's come with a built in serial number so you can uniquely
identify computers.  Many people don't like the idea that they can be
tracked, so they try to turn that off.  There is an option in the linux
kernel (I think) to do this.  RedHat 6.2 by default tries to do
this.  But, if you have an AMD instead of a Pentium, you get nasty kernel
panics (it really confused me for awhile).  But, if you specify that
command above, you can boot just fine.

The Scyld release does not have this problem, and I think later versions
of RedHad have also fixed it.

David
 
> Chris
>