[HN Gopher] Linux drops support for 486 and early Pentium CPUs: ...
___________________________________________________________________
Linux drops support for 486 and early Pentium CPUs: 20 years after
Microsoft
Author : CrankyBear
Score : 32 points
Date : 2025-05-08 17:17 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.zdnet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.zdnet.com)
| os2warpman wrote:
| While the kernel supports 486, we need to be honest with
| ourselves.
|
| Anything older than a Pentium II/III based on the 440-series
| platform is "supported" not "Supported (green checkmark emoji)".
|
| On an actual, physical i486 systems, you run into so many
| problems that it is unusable.
|
| Even on embedded systems where a 486 core was thrown into a SoC
| and "modern" I/O was bolted on you often spend more time
| troubleshooting problems than you would spend moving the entire
| product to a newer architecture.
| terinjokes wrote:
| I just reinstalled Gentoo this past weekend on an IBM ThinkPad
| with a Pentium 4/M and 256MiB of RAM, and even there it's
| probably "supported" not "Supported (green checkmark emoji)".
|
| Most of Linux worked, to it's credit, though I needed to tweak
| libata for some IDE controller quirks presumably lost in the
| PATA driver transition in 2.6.20. VTs worked fine and KMSCON
| worked well, once I loaded the radeonfb driver in initrd.
|
| Where it noticibly falls apart is trying to being up X11, as
| the driver stack in X11 and Mesa have bitrotten (and in Mesa's
| case, removed, and no one is looking at mesa-amber from what I
| understand). A lightweight tiling manager and urxvt was enough
| for it to crash the whole system.
| anthk wrote:
| NetBSD has a better bundled X.org for legacy systems; the
| modular one it's for modern ones.
| dsafasdfas3232 wrote:
| My first computer was a Gateway2000 486/DX 33MHz. I think it was
| the same one that Linus developed on. It had a programmable
| keyboard, and a 14.4 modem. You had to enter the video card clock
| timings manually to run X.
|
| I installed the SLS linux distribution on about 50 3.5 inch
| floppy disks. I think disk 33 was corrupt. Programming was such
| an adventure back then. I miss those days.
| wormius wrote:
| Haha i had a 486/dx2-66 laptop and my first try using linux was
| in 1997 with Debian Bo, IIRC. Downloading over 28.8 modem
| (maybe it was 56k at that point?) took a LOOOOOONG time, and
| then trying to get XFree86 to work was no luck with that
| chipset, even thought it was an IBM computer. It didn't help
| that the only source of info was the computer itself so getting
| online in text mode with a usenet client to ask questions and
| then try to reboot and fail and getting back online etc.
|
| It's amazing how far we've come with video drivers _.
|
| _ sound drivers on the other hand.
| rhelz wrote:
| Ah the good old days. I remember one of my computer
| architecture/compiler professors at Purdue chiding us for
| trashing Intel, pointing out that the 486 was quite comparable in
| performance to the snazzy new RISCs which were in fashion.
| snovymgodym wrote:
| Is there much use of 32-bit only x86 hardware in the wild
| anymore? Genuinely curious, I wouldn't be surprised if there was
| since it was so ubiquitous for a decade or two.
| anthk wrote:
| - Atom n270 netbooks, HN works great under links -g
|
| - Raspberry PI's
|
| - Some RISC-v boards
|
| - Zillions of embedded systems
|
| - Legacy smartphones
| anthk wrote:
| Bye ao486 support then. There's NetBSD at least; and the future
| Hyperbola BSD, among FreeDOS. Altough if you want something close
| to Unix' philosphy, with LIFO like pipes but with words, get a
| Modern FreeDOS Forth for a 486.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-05-08 23:01 UTC)