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Chromium 36 upgrade with SSE2 instructions will not execute on Athlon XP 2400+

Posted 08-31-2014 at 05:36 PM by flshope

I have an 11-year-old computer with an AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (32 bit) processor and ASUSTeK Computer A7V8X motherboard. The machine has Ubuntu 12.04 installed.

A few weeks ago I did a routine software update using the Update Manager. The update was to move to Chromium 36 from 34 (there was no version 35 under Ubuntu). Suddenly, Chromium would no longer run, or even start on this machine, though Chromium 36 is working OK on two other newer Ubuntu machines. When executed from the command line (command: "chromium-browser)", the only thing displayed was "Illegal instruction (core dumped)". I never could find a core file.

After fiddling quite a while with it, I ran "ubuntu-bug chromium-browser" and posted a bug report at Launchpad:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...r/+bug/1353185

One responder there suggested the problem was that Chromium 36 began using something called the SSE2 instruction set (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSE2), which implements different vector floating-point operations (according to wiki). Apparently, the Athlon XP 2400+ central processor in my old machine does not support the SSE2 instructions.

I also learned that Ubuntu does not offer an easy way to revert to a previous software version (like Chromium 34 in this case).

So I am abandoning Chromium on this machine (Firefox and Opera work mostly OK -- Flash Player won't run either.).
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  1. Old Comment
    The Ubuntu Update Manager has posted Chromium 37, which is supposed to fix the SSE2 problem. I installed it, but Chromium still won't start on my Athlon XP 2400+ machine. I did get more descriptive error messages:

    "
    #
    # Fatal error in ../../v8/src/ia32/assembler-ia32.cc, line 53
    # CHECK(cpu.has_sse2()) failed
    #
    . . .
    Illegal instruction (core dumped)
    "

    and posted the complete message at Launchpad:

    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...r/+bug/1353185

    I still don't see a core dump file that is obviously assocated with Chromium.
    Posted 09-03-2014 at 08:23 AM by flshope flshope is offline
  2. Old Comment

    Chromium 39 won't run on AMD Athlon XP 2400+ machine

    Chromium is now up to version 39 and still won't run on this old machine (AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (32 bit) processor and ASUSTeK Computer A7V8X motherboard, purchased 2003). It is probably not a high priority for the developers, and I have other options.
    Posted 12-02-2014 at 12:44 PM by flshope flshope is offline
 

  



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