Comment 16 for bug 254453

Forest Bond wrote: "I have one case where a user installed Ubuntu 8.04 server edition on an EPIA EK board and the machine failed to boot for the first time after installation."

The Via web site says: "The VIA EPIA EK Mini-ITX embedded board is available with the 1GHz or fanless 800MHz VIA Luke CoreFusion™ processor platform". Another page states: "The VIA CoreFusion processor platform is based on the 'Nehemiah' core architecture".

Wikipedia (if it can be believed) claims the Nehemiah has the cmov instruction. Therefore, it seems possible that the board in question has the cmov instruction.

The Nehemiah was a major redesign of the Via processor. The C3 name was kept more for brand recognition purposes than as any reflection of what was in the package. The CoreFusion processors have integrated the Northbridge into the Nehemiah CPU to reduce size and package count. There is more than one version of CoreFusion chip. The differences seem to be related to what sort of graphics and other peripherals were integrated into them.

If the above chain of information is correct, the problem the other user was reporting was not related to cmov. It is possible however that there was some older version of the board which was also known as EK. Did this other user provide the contents of /proc/cpuinfo? That would be the best way to know what processor is in the board.