Is there much use of 32-bit only x86 hardware in the wild anymore? Genuinely curious, I wouldn't be surprised if there was since it was so ubiquitous for a decade or two.
cookiengineer · 2m ago
I know that there's a team at ESA dedicated to buying old 16/32bit hardware and CPUs, because at some point manufacturing precision lead to usage of toxic materials that cannot be filtered out in space ships/station air filter modules.
Additionally, erratas are pretty high once CPUs get more dense due to background radiation. Lots of satellites need special insulation and redundancies to counteract this.
Not sure if they're still using 486/686 CPUs or Pentium/Centrino CPUs though, my knowledge about that is from around 2014. But I know that A31Ps were used for a very long time on the ISS because of those reasons.
os2warpman · 1h ago
While the kernel supports 486, we need to be honest with ourselves.
Anything older than a Pentium II/III based on the 440-series platform is "supported" not "Supported (green checkmark emoji)".
On an actual, physical i486 systems, you run into so many problems that it is unusable.
Even on embedded systems where a 486 core was thrown into a SoC and "modern" I/O was bolted on you often spend more time troubleshooting problems than you would spend moving the entire product to a newer architecture.
terinjokes · 40m ago
I just reinstalled Gentoo this past weekend on an IBM ThinkPad with a Pentium 4/M and 256MiB of RAM, and even there it's probably "supported" not "Supported (green checkmark emoji)".
Most of Linux worked, to it's credit, though I needed to tweak libata for some IDE controller quirks presumably lost in the PATA driver transition in 2.6.20. VTs worked fine and KMSCON worked well, once I loaded the radeonfb driver in initrd.
Where it noticibly falls apart is trying to being up X11, as the driver stack in X11 and Mesa have bitrotten (and in Mesa's case, removed, and no one is looking at mesa-amber from what I understand). A lightweight tiling manager and urxvt was enough for it to crash the whole system.
dsafasdfas3232 · 1h ago
My first computer was a Gateway2000 486/DX 33MHz. I think it was the same one that Linus developed on. It had a programmable keyboard, and a 14.4 modem. You had to enter the video card clock timings manually to run X.
I installed the SLS linux distribution on about 50 3.5 inch floppy disks. I think disk 33 was corrupt. Programming was such an adventure back then. I miss those days.
rhelz · 1h ago
Ah the good old days. I remember one of my computer architecture/compiler professors at Purdue chiding us for trashing Intel, pointing out that the 486 was quite comparable in performance to the snazzy new RISCs which were in fashion.
Additionally, erratas are pretty high once CPUs get more dense due to background radiation. Lots of satellites need special insulation and redundancies to counteract this.
Not sure if they're still using 486/686 CPUs or Pentium/Centrino CPUs though, my knowledge about that is from around 2014. But I know that A31Ps were used for a very long time on the ISS because of those reasons.
Anything older than a Pentium II/III based on the 440-series platform is "supported" not "Supported (green checkmark emoji)".
On an actual, physical i486 systems, you run into so many problems that it is unusable.
Even on embedded systems where a 486 core was thrown into a SoC and "modern" I/O was bolted on you often spend more time troubleshooting problems than you would spend moving the entire product to a newer architecture.
Most of Linux worked, to it's credit, though I needed to tweak libata for some IDE controller quirks presumably lost in the PATA driver transition in 2.6.20. VTs worked fine and KMSCON worked well, once I loaded the radeonfb driver in initrd.
Where it noticibly falls apart is trying to being up X11, as the driver stack in X11 and Mesa have bitrotten (and in Mesa's case, removed, and no one is looking at mesa-amber from what I understand). A lightweight tiling manager and urxvt was enough for it to crash the whole system.
I installed the SLS linux distribution on about 50 3.5 inch floppy disks. I think disk 33 was corrupt. Programming was such an adventure back then. I miss those days.