> Linux doesn't support it due to requiring an FPU. I have used Linux on a 386SX which did not have any FPU. Linux had x87 floating point emulation for a long

> Linux doesn't support it due to requiring an FPU. I have used Linux on a 386SX which did not have any FPU. Linux had x87 floating point emulation for a long time (AFAIK, that emulation has since been removed, together with the rest of the support for very old CPUs). The main reasons Linux doesn't support the 80286 are AFAIK that the 80286 is a 16-bit CPU, and Linux (other than the short-lived ELKS fork) has never supported 16-bit CPUs; and that the 80286 doesn't have paging (it has only segmentation), which would require running it as a "no-MMU" CPU.