FreePBX Distro, old(ish) hardware and Asterisk "illegal Instruction"

Distro Discussion & Help
1

A few of us have encountered the dreaded “Illegal instruction” error where Asterisk doesn’t start and core dumps.

The problem is that the precompiled packages Anaconda pulls down are not the right ones for some of the CPUs, especially for AMD processors.

The most elegant solution would be for the Distro to properly recognize the CPU and pull down packages compiled with the right CPU, but it might become a logistics / management problem.

A compromise is to build Asterisk packages with the BUILD_NATIVE option disabled.

Please consider that: although compiling without that flag doesn’t optimize the code, the Distro usually is not used for heavy duty applications, and non-optimized Asterisk code doesn’t affect much the performances of the overall machine.

Or expand the asterisk-version-switch batch file to download a package with the BUILD_NATIVE flag on or off.

2

We already do this in the RPMs that are built for the current support version of the Distro 5.211.65

3

OK, downloading the 5.x ISO and trying to install onto the same hardware that’s failing with a 4.x ISO.
Will report back later.

4

Ok well then your ticket you opened is misleading as you stated version 5.211.65 as one of the effect versions.

5

Also you can upgrade from 4.211.64 to 5.211.65. Its all outlined in the wiki

6

Success, system is up and running.

The ticket stands, because an earlier 5.211.65-1 distro CD I downloaded a while ago and had here kicking around had the same problem.

This time I’ve downloaded the 1.5GB .img file for the USB install, as the ISO is now ~750MB and I only have 700MB CDs at hand.

A PITA to transfer the .img via dd, and a tad slower to boot, but very happy the system is now up on hardware I was close to give up with.

What is different in Asterisk in the 5.x distro from the older ones then?

I see in the repo there are two set of packages in some of the folders under /digium, with different release tags (e.g. -31/-32 for Asterisk), and on my architecture I have the -31 installed.

Is the installer testing for HW platform and choosing?

And thanks, I know how to update the systems with the scripts, and that at the end of the update path there’s a script to switch one version up. Used it often with perfect results every time. REALLY welcome.

All in all very pleased with the way the distro is moving, and will genuinely try to contribute more. I feel the need to give back something.

Cheers