'illegal hardware instruction'

[AMD_Sempron]

Sigil won't run on CPU's older than Pentium 4, Athlon 64, Opteron (with 'Paris' core) and Sempron (with 'Paris' core), due to the missing SSE2 instruction set:

'illegal hardware instruction' at startup

Namely all AMD Athlon XP CPU's won't work, as SSE2 is an Intel development and was introduced by AMD some years later.

I'm aware that this is not a bug, but a decision made by the developer.

Would you please explicitily give a warning that Sigil >0.2.4 won't run on i586 and older i686 CPU's (FAQ's, Installation Instructions), so that people with obsolete hardware (<2006) won't waste time to try to install Sigil?

Thank you!

BTW: Yes, I had the money to buy a pc with a new cpu. A hardware failure two days after the warranty expired forced me back on my old pc...

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by AMD_Sempron

Would you please explicitily give a warning that Sigil >0.2.4 won't run on i586 and older i686 CPU's (FAQ's, Installation Instructions)

You're right, I should.

Originally Posted by AMD_Sempron

so that people with obsolete hardware (<2006) won't waste time to try to install Sigil?

SSE2 was introduced to Intel CPU's in 2001, and to AMD's CPU's in 2003. Your figure of 2006 is off the mark.

Bottom line, this is such an extremely rare issue that so far, there has been little reason to explicitly state it in the install docs. But I agree, it should be there just in case.

[AMD_Sempron]

Originally Posted by Valloric

SSE2 was introduced to Intel CPU's in 2001, and to AMD's CPU's in 2003. Your figure of 2006 is off the mark.

Bottom line, this is such an extremely rare issue that so far, there has been little reason to explicitly state it in the install docs. But I agree, it should be there just in case.

Yes you're right: AMD introduced SSE2 in 2003. But the last AMD Athlon-XP without SSE2 (socket 'A' / socket 462) was manufactured in July 2005...

BTW: If you check Google's 'chromium browser' bugtracker, this issue is not so extremely rare (at least for chromium): http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=9007

Anyway: I don't want to convince you to support old hardware, it's your decision. But if you can give a warning, it would be helpful for users like me (those who are using old hardware for any reason)...

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by AMD_Sempron

Anyway: I don't want to convince you to support old hardware, it's your decision. But if you can give a warning, it would be helpful for users like me (those who are using old hardware for any reason)...

A note about this is now on the project site, in the FAQ.