On or about Wed 18 Feb 2004 23:18:41 Thomas Biege <thomas@suse.de> announced here (on this list) that there was a kernal patch available and this patch specifically mentioned this source for SuSE 8.1

ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/update/8.1/rpm/i586/k_psmp-2.4.21-189.i586.rpm That patch was auto-applied by YOU on one of my production servers (a dual PII with a software raid on a dual IDE card and which boots from a SCSI drive (aic7xxx). At the time I reported that the patch idendified itself as for an athlon, and I wondered if it was safe to boot that machine with this kernel 189. Yesterday, I got around to finding out. It was NOT safe. It would NOT boot, it kept getting dma timeouts and lost interrupts on one of the ide drives (which were part of the raid 1 array, not the boot drive). I also discovered that booting with the DVD from the boxed set offers no way automated to downgrade the kernel. I was able to boot in rescue mode, mount the /root drive (scsi) and copy the rpms for the older kernel to that drive. Then by physically removing all other drives/controllers except the scsi root drive, I was able to get it to boot and manually install the older kernal rpms for 2.4.19-4GB-SMP. (After pounding on grub for each boot to tell him which drives things were located upon, and manually rebuilding /boot, and a great deal of other hacking). This took the better part of a whole day but I lost no data in the end. Needless to say I'm in no hurry to upgrade to 189 again. There was no hardware error, the 189 kernel simply did not work with this combination, or it was indeed an athlon kernal as it reported itself to be. Would an athlon kernel even boot on a dual Pii machine? Someone reported here that the "athlon thingie" was fixed in the 8.1 smp kernels a day or two later. Was that "thingie" merly cosmetic as was aledged? Are thare other problems with this 189 kernel for 8.1 that have come to light since the announcement? -- _____________________________________ John Andersen