HELP: FC6 kernel on CentOS 4.4 breaks things

[Kristian Hermansen]

I have been desperately awaiting the official release of RHEL5 so that
CentOS-5 can be released and utilized.  So far, it has been delayed
almost a week now.  I am attempting to create a semi-supported server
with a 2.6.18 kernel, which has the new libata subsystem (since
2.6.15) and native command queueing (NCQ), but I get stuck at every
juncture.  I'm looking for suggestions on where I might go from here.
Following are relevant fact and details for the ongoing problem.

* RHEL4 (CentOS 4.4) is supported by VMware Server 1.0.2
* VMware Server 1.0.2 is known to be semi-broken on kernels >= 2.6.19
* SATA performance on 2.6.9 is horrendous, compared to kernel 2.6.17+
  * Thus, we need at least this kernel level.
  * 2.6.18 adds NCQ, so we want that
* Building a Vanilla kernel is not useful, since all the distro
patches for CentOS will be unapplied, and applying all of them myself
is asking for trouble according to the devs @ #centos
* Using the Fedora Core 6 kernel with PAE extensions for > 4GB
(kernel-PAE-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6) on CentOS 4.4 with --nodeps works for
the most part, but breaks hal/hotplug
* Trying to reconfigure VMware Server insitially resulted in a warning
that gcc3 (CentOS) should not be used to compile modules for my kernel
that built with gcc4 (FC6).  So, I installed gcc4 from source, since
gcc4.1.1 package requires libc upgrade and I don't want to do that!
* So, I finally get past that, and now I try to rebuild the vmmon
module first with vmware-config.pl, but it fails with ...

<snip>
e-config5/vmmon-only/./common -I/tmp/vmware-config5/vmmon-only/./linux
-I/tmp/vmware-config5/vmmon-only/./vmcore -DVMW_NOPAGE_261
-DVMWARE__FIX_IO_APIC_BASE=FIX_IO_APIC_BASE_0 -DVMW_HAVE_EPOLL
-DVMW_HAVE_COMPILE_H -DVMW_HAVE_SET_USER_NICE -DMODULE
-D"KBUILD_STR(s)=#s" -D"KBUILD_BASENAME=KBUILD_STR(driver)"
-D"KBUILD_MODNAME=KBUILD_STR(vmmon)"
/tmp/vmware-config5/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c
       657 Floating point exception| scripts/genksyms/genksyms -a i386
>/tmp/vmware-config5/vmmon-only/linux/.tmp_driver.ver
make[2]: *** [/tmp/vmware-config5/vmmon-only/linux/driver.o] Error 136
make[1]: *** [_module_/tmp/vmware-config5/vmmon-only] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-1.2798.fc6-PAE-i686'
make: *** [vmmon.ko] Error 2
make: Leaving directory `/tmp/vmware-config5/vmmon-only'
Unable to build the vmmon module.
</snip>

Right...  So now I am stuck!  What else can people suggest as a
solution to this conundrum?  I don't want to wait 2-3 weeks for
CentOS-5 final :-(
-- 
Kristian Hermansen

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