For maximum performance, the current version of Vespa for x86_64 is compiled only for Haswell (2013) or later CPUs. If trying to run on an older CPU, you will likely see error messages like the following:

Problem running program /opt/vespa/bin/vespa-runserver => died with signal: illegal instruction (you probably have an older CPU than required)

or in older versions of Vespa, something like

/usr/local/bin/start-container.sh: line 67: 10 Illegal instruction /opt/vespa/bin/vespa-start-configserver

If you would like to run Vespa on an older CPU, we provide a generic x86 container image. This image is slower, receives less testing than the regular image, and is less frequently updated.

To start a Vespa Docker container using this image:

$ docker run --detach --name vespa --hostname vespa-container \
  --publish 8080:8080 --publish 19071:19071 \
  vespaengine/vespa-generic-intel-x86_64