JemmyLinux kernel is leaving 486 CPUs behind, only 18 years after the last one made
arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/05/linux-to-end-su…
I didn’t know whether to mark this NSFW or not but it’s time to buy a new computer if you haven’t upgraded in multiple decades.
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I just learned that Tiny Core Linux still supports 486 out of the box in their latest release (Tiny Core 16 with kernel 6.12).
Also, Arch 32 still supports 486 as well though I think only non-GUI packages.
That's the last nail in the coffin for Linux. I'm switching to windows.
gsvOn the plus side, somebody's been working on getting Linux to run on a Commodore-64. So I'm pretty sure the 486 won't be left behind for long.
Why would they make just 486 CPUs? /j
runekoThat's all we needed back on the 90s. Three for the government to run their wargames, one for each major university to run their interwebs pump. one for each blue-chip company to make sure they were complying with trickle-down economics. The remaining were sold overseas to allied countries so they could bootstrap themselves out of the late Renaissance. What a heady time it was to be alive.
circuitfarmer
ikiddGoddammit, now I have to upgrade my mail server...
I think you are good on your mail server for a while.
Linux kernel 6.15 will still boot on a 486. You can pair that with MUSL 1.25 (current) and the latest Busybox to create a perfectly viable Linux system.
Debian Trixie is going to be released in a couple months with kernel 6.12 LTS.
As somebody pointed out in a different post, the Linux Foundation will provide support for kernel 6.12 for 10 years after Debian Trixie is released.
https://www.cip-project.org/about/linux-kernel-core-packages
So, there will be a supported kernel that can be compiled for the 486 until mid 2035 at least.
Are you running bleeding edge on your mail server?
I know this is all just in fun but a mail server is one thing I would certainly want a supported kernel on. Security and email are not friends.
BezierDiscontinued 2007‽
Afaik some where still used in space probes in the 2000's.
khannieI remember reading forever ago that NASA was hunting for old 8086 processors from 1978 for the space shuttle when it was still flying.
Found this article from 2002.
Tbh, I understand the problem. There are just so many volunteers for making newer developments work on every platform. Streamlining the development and easing the load on the volunteer devs seems a good idea.
Having that said, it’s ofc a pity to drop support for devices. At least the LTS kernels will support the current support for a while and the vibrant Linux community will find a good way to work it out, I have no doubt. Many machines, in particular old ones, run with very old kernels to begin with…
I won’t repeat the whole message but
https://www.cip-project.org/about/linux-kernel-core-packages
There will be a Linux Foundation supported kernel that can be built for 486 until at least 2035. After that, you might have to backport security fixes yourself.
katy ✨Just as the MiSTer has started putting (sorta) 486s back in people's hands, although if the newly required instructions aren't too complicated, I suppose someone could conceivably add them to the core.
I guess one unknown for me is how the capability detection of the kernel works and if it works on instruction detection or if it determines it via CPUID.
A big also is that I've not yet tried to run Linux on mine yet so I'm not even sure it's possible with a modern kernel anyway. I think I remember seeing someone got an old version of redhat or Debian working
I've seen a whole raft of 386 machines on AliExpress recently. I need to investigate what's actually in them .
Edit: it's just 386s
Edit 2: 386 soc on board
Ah I believe those are powered by chips originally intended to be used in industrial control use cases.
Loads of old manufacturing machines & software out there that are built around a 386/486, and given intel hasn't exactly been making those models in a good while, some companies stepped up to provide compatible replacements for those situations.
Someone on AliExpress had the idea of using them in a more pc-like product for retro gaming, and voila we have all these modern 386/486 clones
Yeah they seem to be M6117 386 soc. They're a bit pricey to buy on a whim, but I'll keep an eye out, might be fun to tinker with.
Ridiculous
DeebsterAre you saying you think it's ridiculous to end support "already"?
I think it's likely that anyone still using 486s isn't updating software anyway, so it's unlikely to matter aside from niches like retro devices. Luckily, open source means that if there's a genuine desire there'll probably be a fork to provide it.
That's a real showcase of how linux actually cares about its users over other companies. It's great to see that hardware I buy now will be supported on linux for a long long time into the future.
I'm kind of shocked that it's only been 18 years since the last 486 chip was made. It was launched in 1989 and discontinued in 2008, while the original Pentium was launched in 1993 and discontinued in 1999. Hell, the Pentium 4 was discontinued in 2007.
It's quite incredible, and very interesting. I wonder why they continued to produce these CPUs.
Probably for industrial machines.
Yup. Airplanes, for example, take a lot of validation. It's extremely expensive to retest a new configuration, so they make one computer, get it validated, and use it unmodified for the next thirty years.
This is why the Boeing Max 8 thing was a big deal. They made approved modifications, but found in rare conditions it could cause unexpected and dangerous flight conditions. But, a times b times c was estimated to be less than the cost of doing it properly, so they didn't.
Same with industrial automation. There's some robotic arms, assembly lines, etc in use today that still use PCs with ISA slots - the predecessor to PCI, which was the predecessor to PCIe. Old 16-bit bus with a max speed of around 5Mbps. That's why you'll occasionally see newish "industrial" motherboards that have ISA slots and parallel ports.
They also often have a lot of the hardware in stock and ready to deploy, to handle replacements.
A project I worked on at university (way back in 2010) was for one of the largest providers of air traffic control systems. Our project was interesting - overlaying eye tracking data from Tobii eye trackers they provided (thousands of dollars each at the time) on top of screen recordings taken via VNC, to aid in training of air traffic controllers.
It was even more interesting to learn about some of their processes, though. Whenever they built an ATC computer system for a client, they'd build one or two spares at the same time, with exactly identical hardware. They did this for two reasons:
We got to see a storage room with a large number of these systems. Lots of different PCs anywhere from a month to maybe 15 years old. :)
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WTF can you link this?
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Isn’t that the employee who was found dead like a week later? You know, the one Boeing killed?
Yeah, the amount of industrial machinery being controlled by ancient hardware would baffle a lot of people.
For a comparison people might relate to: There are ATMs running twenty year old versions of Windows XP.
There are still ATMs running OS/2 and probably lots of POS systems running DOS.
I think you can still buy new 486 compatible chips today.
https://www.vortex86.com/
There's no way in hell 2007 was 18 years ago.
Time is weird. A few years ago, I would have agreed. Now I feel that everything from March 2020 to now was just yesterday, and everything before covid is ancient history
This is absurd! Think of all the 486 cpus that will become EWASTE! LINUX HATES THE ENVIRONMENT!
/s in case not obvious.
Linux newb here. So I'm assuming this would make the kernel smaller, and take up less space. Would it be significant?
It’s probably less about making the kernel smaller and more about security and reviewing code. The less code you have to maintain, the fewer vulnerabilities even if it’s old code.
I would doubt almost 20 year-old code is taking up a lot of space or presenting new vulnerabilities. And it’s obviously open source so if anyone needs it, they can always use an older kernel or maintain it. Sometimes, your oldest code is insane. I wish there was a budget for every company and government to pay retirees part time to go back over their oldest code that’s still in use. A lot of retired programmers would do it for fun and nostalgia. And to be horrified something they wrote 20 years ago hasn’t been updated or replaced.
There is no budget for it AFAICT but there is https://github.com/abandonware and others trying to help on that path.
The Linux kernel is well over 30 million lines of code (lots of that is drivers).
This change shrinks the kernel by about 15,000 lines. That is not nothing, but it hardly moves the needle.
It is just one less thing to have to worry about and one less constraint to limit flexibility in the future.
The size difference is not significant. This is about the maintenance burden. When you need to change some of the code where CPU architecture specific things happen you always have to consider what to do with the code path or the compiler flags that concern 486 CPUs.
Here is the announcement by the maintainer Ingo Molnar where he lists some of the things he can now remove and stop worrying about: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250425084216.3913608-1-mingo@kernel.org/
Actually, most devices today run an amd64 kernel (amd or intel cpus in typical desktops or servers) or arm (phones, some modern notebooks). Those architectures never supported 486 cpus.
I assume, the code removed is in the x86 branch, excluded when compiling for other architectures. As others said, I guess this is mostly about maintainance effort and testing.
(But then i don't know much about the kernels. Maybe there's some interplay between amd64 and
x64x86 architectures.)AMD64 and x64 are the same thing. Do you mean AMD64 and x86? There is definitely interplay there, as AMD64 implements the x86-32 instruction set.
yes, i meant x86
Whew. My 586 is safe.
I remember when Mandrake was a young distro -- a redhat derivative -- and they (gasp) chose to compile for i586 instead of i386. People were like VROooooOM! And a bunch of other people were like: why would you target CPU instructions that not everyone has?!
I switched to Mandrake for that (back in the day).
for now
For now
The Linux kernel still supports Pentium but most Linux distros do not. The only two I can think of are Adelie and Gentoo. Nothing based on Debian does (Pentium Pro minimum).
Sorry, my bad. I found my old 486 PC in my parent's attic recently, and started planning to get it running again
If anyone is actually using a 486 still, you can try using the kernels that the CIP maintains
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/cip/linux-cip.git
They actually still support kernel 4.4
The latest kernels still work on 486 - kernel 6.14 currently.
I just meant after support is dropped. The CIP I think supports each of its kernels for 10 years? So whatever the last kernel is before they officially drop support will still be maintained by them for a long time. :)
Got it. I was not familiar with this Linux Foundation initiative. Very cool.
It looks like they support the LTS kernels as an extension of Debian. So, kernel 6.12 will get 10 years of support after Debian Trixie launches with it this summer.
That means 486 will be fully supported until at least mid 2035. Amazing.
That's what I'm saying! It's kinda awesome how long things get supported in linux land!
but what abt my 386SX tho
https://github.com/marmolak/gray386linux
Also check out ELKS for your even older CPUs.
Nooooooooo my...wait I've never actually owned a 486. Carry On.
I never owned a 486 either. My first upgrade after the 286 was a Pentium.
First they came for 486, and I did not speak out - because I've never actually owned a 486...
Boo.
Me neither but I did own an 6502 based compy.
My first PC was a Pentium 2 though.
Yeah, me neither... I moved from an 8088 (8Mhz) to a 386dx (40Mhz) directly to a Pentium 90Mhz.... Skipped the 486...
I think it should be possible to still run Linux on almost every 25 years old computer.
If the computer is older than this, it really becomes a piece of history and I can accept that it’d take efforts from the user to keep it in use, just like a collection car.
I only hope no bricking update is gonna be proposed to the people running such old hardware. The distribution should check if the hardware is compatible with a newer kernel before updating.
Still I think it’s important that Linux remains the OS of choice for old hardware and that the some distros remain deficated to these museum pieces.
I think older versions of the kernel (that support 486 hw) would still be available to download so someone could use them if they wanted. Not sure what other extre work would be involved though.
The issue is that older kernel versions will lose support and stop getting security updates eventually. I don't know if there is enough of a community around old CPUs for fixes to be backported by the community.
i love backwards compatibility as much as the next guy, but at some point, if there isn't enough of a community to backport fixes, there probably aren't many using them. if a tree falls in the forest, you get the idea.
Yea if you have a 468 connected to the internet it's probably not your primary computer that you depend on anyway.
You wouldn't want to keep such old equipment connected to a network anyway. That's only inviting trouble down the line.
What does the age of the hardware have to do with it?
You can run a 486 today with the latest Linux kernel, the latest C library, and the latest utilities. A 486 is not vulnerable to Spectre and Meltdown. It may be more secure than a typical i7.
Come to think of it. Acting as a bastion server may be a legitimate use of a 486 today.
"My baby, you have blossomed into a wonderful adult. It's time to stop relying on us now, though. Go on and do big things, or something..."
Is the coming of age ceremony when he loads Doom?
i like this. hardware should be the least disposable as possible, as long as there is manpower to maintain it. as long as theres people still using it fruitfully, its not trash.
Lol, from the title I thought that 486 models of specific CPUs were going to be affected, that sounded way more impactful
Following the links in the article, someone got windows xp to load on a 486…
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Old kernels still run on it, it just won't get new versions.
The reason Linux (and BSD) is perfect for old machines is that the source code is available, so anyone can maintain it if they want to. It doesn't mean the core Linux team has to maintain it for them though.
Yeah, you're right.
You really got dogpiled hard there, as if being corrected half a dozen times wasn't enough, they had to downvote you to oblivion as well :(
I don't mind that people write that old hardware can still be used, because they are correct, but the number of downvotes breaks my heart.
As somebody that offered a “correction”, I can assure you that I did not downvote.
You could simply continue to use the older versions - with Linux, you're not forced to update if you don't want to. Since it's open source, you could even continue modifying it freely. I think the people behind Linux are being a bit overkill in supporting older hardware in the most recent releases.
Of course.
Latest 486 “distro” released 3 months ago:
https://github.com/marmolak/gray486linux
Same userland as Alpine Linux. Newer version of MUSL than current Void Linux ships with. Up to the minute kernel.
The oldest kernel version still getting updates at kernel.org is from 6 years ago. So, we may still have active 486 support in official kernels for years yet.
Even after that, the kernel will stay available. You can always backport any important security fixes yourself.
And this is just the kernel. A 486 will run current c libraries for decades most likely.
You can still use Linux on 386 and Git commits as recent as a year ago say things like “adding support for new hardware”.
https://github.com/marmolak/gray386linux
Again, even on a 386 you have the same C library and userland as found in current Alpine Linux.
Good
Its like... Bro... Its a 486 CPU
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Over 30 years of support :)
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It's about 15 years ago I used a 486 based embedded board with ethernet, can't remember the name of it.
You can still run perfectly good software on it. You'll just be limited by the resources, so you're not playing Crysis by any means.
Just a few years ago I got a 286 up and running with Minix. It was neat, but I didn't get as far as compiling the Ethernet driver, so I didn't really do much with it and it eventually finished its journey to recycling.
Can always go for NetBSD?
Make sure it is not a 486SX. NetBSD requires an FPU. Linux is able to emulate one in software.
I guess? I'm not very knowledgeable about BSD.
No better time to learn!
" The minimal configuration for a NetBSD/i386 system requires at least 32M of RAM and 512M of disk space. Smaller configurations are possible, but require e.g. custom kernel configurations.
Any i486 or better CPU should work - genuine Intel or a compatible such as Cyrix, AMD, or NexGen."
It should say 486DX or better as NetBSD requires an FPU.
But apparently somebody has been working on SoftFPU support and they just released a first version a week ago!
https://github.com/mezantrop/i486SX_soft_FPU?tab=readme-ov-file
Huzzah!
Wow, to wake up and see that a large number of people have downvoted my simple noob comment is definitely something. C'mon people, chill, I am quite new to all this stuff.
And how much have you paid for the last 18 years of support? You can continue to run Linux on old hardware, as long as you’re willing to pay for the development. 18 years is one hell of a freemium model.