This brings me back to comments from industry insiders that they were still fabbing around a million 486 CPUs a year into this century, still wondering where they were going in 2007.

A woman at work demolished her 2003 IBM Centrino Thinkpad for a work recycling event, was sort of disappointed

rmay635703 wrote on 2025-05-01, 03:52:

This brings me back to comments from industry insiders that they were still fabbing around a million 486 CPUs a year into this century, still wondering where they were going in 2007.

Critical embedded and insustrial systems.

Definitely not running a bleeding edge Linux kernel, many possibly not even installed in a PC compatible platform.

Bare metal software, at best maybe FreeDOS or DR-DOS to bootstrap an application from a RAM disk.

There's a huge world out there.

Jo22: what would you like to run on a 486 with modern Linux? Or are you mainly wanting to keep i486 kernel support for posterity's sake? Assuming i486 was supported, could a DX4-100 w/modern linux be turned into a decent router?

The oldest computer I have in the house which runs Linux for normal tasks is a P4 3.8 GHz Prescott w/hyper threading. It runs Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and still barely receives critical security updates. This is my garage computer and I only use it when doing mechanic work, usually to look up factory service manuals or watch youtube videos on car repair. That system can barely cope with these minimalistic tasks. To speed it up some, I put in a SATA3 card with a modern SSD. Even in this use case, one might consider such a setup self torture. For me, I find it barely good enough for the task. Upgrading to a new distro would make it even slower.

i486 w/Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, assuming there was support, could run what well? Would it not be preferred to use an older Linux distro with a solid modern router, rather than waiting 3 weeks for your i486 to boot-up and start Chromium?

feipoa wrote on 2025-05-01, 06:54:

The oldest computer I have in the house which runs Linux for normal tasks is a P4 3.8 GHz Prescott w/hyper threading. It runs Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and still barely receives critical security updates. This is my garage computer and I only use it when doing mechanic work, usually to look up factory service manuals or watch youtube videos on car repair. That system can barely cope with these minimalistic tasks.

I'm impressed your P4 still manages. Offline that PC could do it all - play the video, show the manuals etc - there is something about being online that really seems to 'require' >4gb ram and at least 2 cores

gerry wrote on 2025-05-01, 08:33:

I'm impressed your P4 still manages. Offline that PC could do it all - play the video, show the manuals etc - there is something about being online that really seems to 'require' >4gb ram and at least 2 cores

Web browser performance has come a long way in the past decade. I recently installed Windows 10 on my Pentium 4 – the OS chugged, but the latest Chromium release ran pretty well. I only had issues maintaining 30 fps when playing 720p YouTube videos – the same machine could achieve that just fine on Windows 7.

gerry wrote on 2025-05-01, 08:33:

there is something about being online that really seems to 'require' >4gb ram and at least 2 cores

JavaScript bloat mostly.

It so happens that Chromium recently stopped working on this P4 Prescott system. I was using the Chromium snap app (135.0.7049.114) and it worked just fine as of 3 months ago. It ran faster than Firefox. I uninstalled Chromium, then reinstalled. Chromium opens, but if I search on a webpage, the browser crashes. If I try to open Chromium again, I get a wall of errors in Terminal - ends with "illegal instruction (core dumped)." Oh well. File a ticket? More like just forget about it.

The latest Google Chrome version for this system is 108, which is quite outdated now. On the plus side, Firefox (snap) 128.10.0/esr is still updating.

However, it is clear that this system's days are numbered. I might get 2 more years out of it. There's no practical path for upgrade. I cannot imagine using a 486 on modern Linux for anything other than curiosity.

I assume that the next "victims" might be Athlon 64 (and earlier).

i386 support was dropped in 2012, because it was too much of a burden to keep emulation for CMPXCHG instruction (source).

i486 support is now being dropped in 2025, because it is too much of a burden to keep emulation for CMPXCHG8B instruction (source).

So logically, if it's a ~13 years cycle, Athlon 64 support is going to be dropped in 2038, when again it will be too much of a burden to keep emulation for CMPXCHG16B instruction.

Optimistically spoken, I wonder if they can endure for so long.
-> Athlon 64 also was the foundation of x86_64 aka x64 or AMD64.

How it affected Windows 8.1 x64: https://www.pcworld.com/article/448350/new-wi … -windows-8.html

What's good to be kept in mind, though: removal of i486 support is a tad bit worse than that of the i386 support.
Because, many Linux distributions in the 90s had the i486 as a minimum from very start.

The removal of the i386 support in 2012 was rather of an symbolic act, because Mr. Penguin had written Linux on a 386, originally.
That's why support for it was kept for so long, the 386 had a symbolic value.
Which is okay, but shouldn't be measured in same way as i486 support.

PS: The year 2038 is interesting in so far, because of Year 2038 problem.
Maybe 32-Bit support will end altogether by that time?

Athlon 64 already has some issues with simple installation of bleeding edge Linux distros.

Jo22 wrote on 2025-05-01, 13:28:

Maybe 32-Bit support will end altogether by that time?

32-bit systems are also being updated to be y2k38-proof. It's not that such systems can't work with 64-bit integers, it's just a bit (no pun intended) more expensive to implement from a system resource perspective, since they don't fit in a single CPU register.

There will certainly still be many 32-bit embedded systems chugging along by that time, so those will have to be fixed, if they are still affected.

GemCookie wrote on 2025-05-01, 09:54:

Web browser performance has come a long way in the past decade. I recently installed Windows 10 on my Pentium 4 – the OS chugged, but the latest Chromium release ran pretty well. I only had issues maintaining 30 fps when playing 720p YouTube videos – the same machine could achieve that just fine on Windows 7.

that's interesting, not what i would have expected - some efficiency (accidental or otherwise) on chromium perhaps

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2025-05-01, 13:31:

Athlon 64 already has some issues with simple installation of bleeding edge Linux distros.

I have Linux Mint on an old E6550 775 system with only 4gb ram, it is at the lower end of comfortable - even accounting for its low ram for online use. Linux mainstream distributions for the desktop are a good option for older hardware, but even with 64bit systems the limits are starting to show

If you're not targeting 386/486 in the first place, supporting them becomes kind of useless, since the code you write is probably not going to perform acceptably on them anyway even if it runs.

So I think there is alot of potential for breakage from the reasons discussed. However, the nice thing about Linux, and other systems that are open source, is that the old versions are not simply just going away, and anyone can make whatever changes they want. You don't have that with closed source systems. So it can be relatively easy to keep it going. That is the part that I'm interested in, is what people do end up running on these. Although any forks to keep a running i486 will be rather esoteric, it will still be welcome by me.

Indeed you may see in not too long, distros dropping x86_64 level 1 or whatever it's called. But I don't think this is really the fault of the kernel people making those choices. Modern linux is good, but follows mainstream movements a bit too much now. Hopefully there will always be a distro that does things a little better.

keenmaster486 wrote on 2025-05-01, 15:38:

If you're not targeting 386/486 in the first place, supporting them becomes kind of useless, since the code you write is probably not going to perform acceptably on them anyway even if it runs.

386/486 can still keep up with some text-based networking applications, such as SSH (the most burdensome part of the encryption is the initial handshake; they can keep up with at least a few tens of KB/s once it's up and running), curl/wget for file transfers, Links for lightweight HTTPS web browsing (mostly for file transfers also), etc.

I guess it's a philosophical thing whether the effort is better placed in backporting those things to DOS-extended or Win9x versions (e.g., Links to old Cygwin), or to attempt to run a modern-ish Linux on the machine.

If someone seriously wanted to keep doing modern Linux, and I also question the value in that, in the back of my mind would be some other kernel specifically designed to be lightweight but syscall-compatible with Linux so as to support Linux applications in userspace--as opposed as trying to take modern Linux and #ifdef away all the bloat. Minix3 is something like that for NetBSD userspace, but I believe it targets i586 minimum. And speaking of BSDs, they're probably a better target here anyway because they aren't so fast-moving. The nice thing about NetBSD is if you want to run it on a 486, and it has 32MB RAM and PCI, you could still even run the "stock" version without having to compile your own kernel (which is required for ISA/VLB video).

I'm surprised Linux latest kernel was supporting 486s until now!
Like others already mentioned, there are simply no justifiable use cases for maintaining support for such an old architecture, keep in mind there is a HUGE difference between old hardware (cheaper and readly available) and vintage hardware (slower, rarer and expensive), it only makes sense keeping support for the former IMHO.
Honestly, if you have any business or important process nowadays running on 486s that requires a modern OS, do yourself a favor and just sell them all, then buy something exponentially faster with a fraction of the money you just made.

What with all the features in modern distros they would struggle to run on a 486 anyway wouldnt they?

Wasn’t there a longish post about second-sourcing 486 chips just a few hours ago in this very thread?

rmay635703 wrote on 2025-05-01, 03:52:

This brings me back to comments from industry insiders that they were still fabbing around a million 486 CPUs a year into this century, still wondering where they were going in 2007.

A woman at work demolished her 2003 IBM Centrino Thinkpad for a work recycling event, was sort of disappointed

The first 186s I ever saw were around that time in checkpoint rfid antenna gates.
Symbol barcode scanners ran dos. I forget what86 they were.

When you just want to achieve some basic task, you build what's cheap, available, well understood, and supported.

Millions of people know x86. Back then, not many knew ARM.
Board design? Every pc oem can do it. Interface with x special thing? Whole industries rose and fell at 115200 baud. Drivers? Same deal.

Arm took over pretty convincingly, but for a fair while, the hidden computers built to sit and do one thing with complete neglect were old x86s.

Ringding wrote on 2025-05-03, 15:11:

Wasn’t there a longish post about second-sourcing 486 chips just a few hours ago in this very thread?

Yes, I wrote one, but then deleted it again. I felt it would just get on everyone's nerve. :( I also was sort of repeating myself here.

rmay635703 wrote on 2025-05-01, 03:52:

This brings me back to comments from industry insiders that they were still fabbing around a million 486 CPUs a year into this century, still wondering where they were going in 2007.

When the local IBM plant closed, the chips were being produced (somewhere else) in enough volume it wasn't even worth packing them up when they left. Oh how I wish I had trespassed with a sack...