The 486 CPU is somewhat of a relic these days, but its legacy lives on in the Linux kernel. i486 has been the de facto minimum for decades. Even Linux, which has long championed an outdated architecture, I am considering giving up Drop support for 486 processors on the chip, much like they did with 386 in 2012.
the news is Posting to the Linux kernel mailing list (opens in new tab) From Linus Torvalds himself.Recently keen to add something like the Rust programming language (opens in new tab)Support for Intel Arc GPUs and Loongson CPUs (opens in new tab) Regarding the Linux kernel, Torvalds is currently considering removing the venerable 486, writing:
The idea, which seems so obvious these days with Raptor Lake and Ryzen 7000, has received some backlash from some users, along with claims that new hardware based on aging silicon is still shipping. rice field. When the same plan was brought up a year before him, one user said he still had a 486 and wanted to continue using it.
Dating back to 1989, 486 is the lowest possible spec for running Linux today and works best with lightweight distributions such as Tiny Core Linux (opens in new tab).
It all comes down to cmpxchg8b , an instruction that compares and swaps 8 bytes (or 64 bits) of information in your computer’s memory. Mailing list member Peter Zijlstra said that Linux should only support processors that can do this, leaving the 32-bit 486 behind, and that the new Linux kernel will run on P5 class hardware or later. I suggested that you mean The cmpxchg8b instruction is the culprit behind the original Pentium “F00F” bug. The bug rendered affected CPUs without operating system mitigations non-functional until rebooted when asked to execute an instruction.
Kernel 6.1, released this year, will be the long-term support kernel, but Torvalds endorses the idea, so it may be the last kernel to work on the 486.
