Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, October 23 (Xinhua)-- Linus Torvalds, the "father of Linux", recently said that it is considering removing support for Intel i486 (aka 486 or 80486) processors from the Linux kernel.

I486 has been the lowest x86 processor support for mainline Linux cores since i386 was abandoned by the Linux kernel a decade ago.

Recently, Linus Torvalds himself expressed the idea of changing to a minimum x86 32-bit CPU to support "cmpxchg8b", that is, Pentium processors and future products.

Maybe we should grit our teeth and say that we only support x86-32 with "cmpxchg8b" (that is, Pentium and later). I think most (or even all) distributions have enabled X86_PAE, which makes X86_CMPXCHG64 part of the basic requirement.

It's not that I don't believe that most distributions will now do 32-bit development. We got rid of i386 support in 2012. Maybe it's time to get rid of i486 support in 2022?

According to phoronix, when it was suggested a year ago that the Linux kernel might give up support for i486, one developer commented that he still had an i486 system and claimed that the antique machine still had some use.

CTOnews.com learned that the i486 is a 32-bit microprocessor introduced by Intel in 1989, uses a 1 μ m (micron) manufacturing process, integrates 1.2 million transistors, has a clock rate of 25MH ~ 50MHz, and uses RISC (reduced instruction set) technology for the first time in the x86 series.

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