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According to Wikipedia, Intel’s 945 chipset for Core 2 processors ships with UEFI. This was originally released in 2006. Note that Google Chrome which is the w

According to Wikipedia, Intel’s 945 chipset for Core 2 processors ships with UEFI. This was originally released in 2006. Note that Google Chrome which is the web browser with the highest adoption rate requires a CPU with SSE3 support which was introduced in 2004. Which platform older than a Core 2 can even run the latest operating systems? The very latest Pentium 4 range (2004-2006)? So we would just be dropping support for them? That’s OK.

lynguist 5y ago
I found that the latest BIOS only devices were released in 2013 which are based on the AMD Bobcat processor (AMD’s version of Intel Atom). I wouldn’t know what operating system to run on those systems.
cestith 5y ago
OpenBSD 7.1 was just released and supports my G5 Mac. It also supports i386, UltraSparc, and Digital Alpha. NetBSD supports i386, Alpha, Amiga, 32-bit Sparc, 32-bit MIPS, ARMv6, StrongARM, sun2, sun3... LinuxMint still supports i686. Debian supports i386, i686, armel, armhf, s390, and MIPS. Slackware supports i586 and s390. Kali supports i686. Void Linux supports i686, ARMv6, ARV7. FreeBSD supports arm, armel, i386, ia64, mips, mipsel, sparc64, pc98, powerpc, powerpc64, ps3, xbox. Alpine supports i486, ppc64le, s390x, armhf. Devuan supports i686. Gentoo supports i486, i586, i686, alpha, arm, hppa, ia64, mips, powerpc, ppc64, sparc64. Which of these don't have recent releases?
- lynguist 5y ago
  According to discussions on the Gentoo [1] and Fedora [2] forums, i686 without SSE2 could be broken in some packages in subtle ways. One is that the stack alignment changed from 4 bytes to 16 bytes, another is long NOPs, another is that some software seems to require SSE2 on i686 like rustc or qt. Even those platforms that claim to build for i686, I’m not sure if everything works correctly on pre-SSE2 (Pentium Pro, Pentium III, older Pentium 4) CPUs. And I don’t think any of the Linux distributions will actually run on a i386, i486 or i586 as i686 is almost required to have multithreading without busy waits. The BSDs I don’t know about, but it’s a fair number of distributions that seem to support older x86 CPUs you posted. I didn’t know there would be so many. I couldn’t find Linux Mint though. [1]: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1087434.html?sid=4b6827908e12de8e6092b660efa28f3a https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1087434.html?sid=4b682... [2]: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/HC2NLE3CQHIJRWFYSPR6HQI67PZLZP4E/ https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fe...

lynguist 5y ago

I found that the latest BIOS only devices were released in 2013 which are based on the AMD Bobcat processor (AMD’s version of Intel Atom). I wouldn’t know what operating system to run on those systems.

cestith 5y ago

OpenBSD 7.1 was just released and supports my G5 Mac. It also supports i386, UltraSparc, and Digital Alpha. NetBSD supports i386, Alpha, Amiga, 32-bit Sparc, 32-bit MIPS, ARMv6, StrongARM, sun2, sun3... LinuxMint still supports i686. Debian supports i386, i686, armel, armhf, s390, and MIPS. Slackware supports i586 and s390. Kali supports i686. Void Linux supports i686, ARMv6, ARV7. FreeBSD supports arm, armel, i386, ia64, mips, mipsel, sparc64, pc98, powerpc, powerpc64, ps3, xbox. Alpine supports i486, ppc64le, s390x, armhf. Devuan supports i686. Gentoo supports i486, i586, i686, alpha, arm, hppa, ia64, mips, powerpc, ppc64, sparc64. Which of these don't have recent releases?

lynguist 5y ago
According to discussions on the Gentoo [1] and Fedora [2] forums, i686 without SSE2 could be broken in some packages in subtle ways. One is that the stack alignment changed from 4 bytes to 16 bytes, another is long NOPs, another is that some software seems to require SSE2 on i686 like rustc or qt. Even those platforms that claim to build for i686, I’m not sure if everything works correctly on pre-SSE2 (Pentium Pro, Pentium III, older Pentium 4) CPUs. And I don’t think any of the Linux distributions will actually run on a i386, i486 or i586 as i686 is almost required to have multithreading without busy waits. The BSDs I don’t know about, but it’s a fair number of distributions that seem to support older x86 CPUs you posted. I didn’t know there would be so many. I couldn’t find Linux Mint though. [1]: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1087434.html?sid=4b6827908e12de8e6092b660efa28f3a https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1087434.html?sid=4b682... [2]: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/HC2NLE3CQHIJRWFYSPR6HQI67PZLZP4E/ https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fe...