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Would it be feasible to just build a Debian image for the i486? Few packages should depend on something newer.
by quotemstr 6y ago
Would it be feasible to just build a Debian image for the i486? Few packages should depend on something newer.
- asveikau 6y agoI don't know offhand what instructions were introduced in Pentium or later. Doing some googling... 486 had cmpxchg, that's good. Seems it didn't have rdtsc. It's not out of the question, I might say even pretty common, for user mode code to use that one via inline asm to implement a timer. Obviously no SIMD instructions. If they say they're supporting 686 or better they might have some compiler flags that depend on mmx or similar? SSE came late to P6.
- giantrobot 6y agoSince the modern Linux kernel doesn't make any promises of 486 support there's very likely plenty of places inline assembly uses instructions unavailable on a 486. So even if you compiled it with strict -march i486 you'd end up with unsupported instructions. Modern GCC also doesn't like emitting strict i386 or i486 code anymore so you'd be likely to end up with unsupported instructions even without any inline assembly.