The Linux Kernel May Finally Phase Out Intel i486 CPU Support

"Linus Torvalds has backed the idea of possibly removing Intel 486 (i486) processor support from the Linux kernel," reports Phoronix:After the Linux kernel dropped i386 support a decade ago, i486 has been the minimum x86 processor support for the mainline Linux kernel. This latest attempt to kill off i486 support ultimately arose from Linus Torvalds himself with expressing the idea of possibly requiring x86 32-bit CPUs with "cmpxchg8b" support, which would mean Pentium CPUs and later: Maybe we should just bite the bullet, and say that we only support x86-32 with 'cmpxchg8b' (ie Pentium and later). Get rid of all the "emulate 64-bit atomics with cli/sti, knowing that nobody has SMP on those CPU's anyway", and implement a generic x86-32 xchg() setup using that try_cmpxchg64 loop. I think most (all?) distros already enable X86_PAE anyway, which makes that X86_CMPXCHG64 be part of the base requirement. Not that I'm convinced most distros even do 32-bit development anyway these days.... We got rid of i386 support back in 2012. Maybe it's time to get rid of i486 support in 2022? Towards the end of his post, Torvalds makes the following observation about i486 systems. "At some point, people have them as museum pieces. They might as well run museum kernels. "

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