this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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Friendly reminder that Debian still has an i686 build that in theory supports processors as old as the Pentium 4, and they only dropped their i586 build (that went back to the original Pentium) this year.
Debian sometimes feels like the system that will run on a salad bowl powered by two potatoes and a pickled cucumber.
The range of architectures it supports is mindboggling.
It's definitely awesome.
Interestingly/amazingly, it doesn't support all the architectures that the kernel supports. The kernel still supports 486 processors, although modern Linux on a 486 would actually be extremely slow since all the modern CPU capabilities/extensions are missing. There was talk about removing 486 support last year (increasing the minimum CPU for the Linux kernel up to the Pentium 1) but I don't think that's actually gone anywhere yet.
Jessie was the last Debian release which supported i586, the support was dropped in 2016. https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2016/05/msg00001.html
Ah, my mistake. Thanks for the correction :)
Aside from bragging rights... is there a reason why someone would still be working on a Pentium 4?
It's probably mostly legacy systems for things like industrial automation.
You can actually still buy industrial motherboards with ISA and PCI slots, for both older CPUs (like the Pentium 4) and newer CPUs (like modern-ish Core i3/i5/i7). There's also clone CPUs that behave the same as older ones.
A lot of industrial systems are big, expensive, last a long time, and were designed for use with particular hardware, which is why there's a pretty decent market for clones of old hardware.
Having said that... I'm not sure they'd use a newer operating system on these systems. The OS they run is likely 20 years old too. So... To answer your question, I'm not sure. Retro hardware enthusiasts tend to use an OS from the same time period.
I have a Pentium 4 line PC that I use for work. It’s actually a Xeon but same architecture. It has the only board I could find with USB 3 and SATA 3. Thing is a beast. Threw a 970 in it for a while while I didn’t have a gaming pc, and I had no problems playing (2017) contemporary games at 1080p60 in almost all cases.
I still use it as my repo for schematics and as the body to my over desk displays. I’ll probably keep it for another few years at least. It works great.