That is weird.  I just checked "make menuconfig".  I could have sworn that in
the same menu section as processor selection was also the F0 0F workaround (in
the 2.2.X kernel), now under 2.4.17 it seems to have disappeared (tried
selecting the following 3 options, one after the other: 586, Pentium Classic,
Pentium MMX).  In all cases the workaround never showed up.

>         This seems to be somewhat (but not really) similar to that problem I'm
> having with my Pentium laptop (At least it's on-topic). Ive got this
> Compaq LTE laptop and unfortunetly it has a pentium with the F0 0F bug.
> Now I know that the linux kernel has wrokarounds for this bug but in
> recent kernel versions it seems to be broken? I can't boot the system
> into RH 7.2 install (7.1 works fine) because kernels from 2.4.5+ haven't
> worked for me. Does anybody have any ideas on how to get the workaround
> to compile in the kernel? I've looked at the code but I don't understand
> why it's not working, all the pre-req's seem fine. Maybe it's being
> detected as a different processor? I have tried GCC 2.96 and 3.0.3 no
> difference.
> 
>         On boot the kernel hangs with a processor error that scrolls
> indefinetly.