The Linux kernel is about to say goodbye to a piece of very old hardware. The merge queue for version 7.1 includes a change that marks the beginning of the phase-out of support for i486 processors.
According to The Register, the patch comes from Ingo Molnar, an experienced kernel developer and maintainer who has been active in the Linux community for decades. He proposed the change in late March, though it didn’t receive wider attention until later. The core of the proposal is relatively simple: specific configuration options for 486 systems will be removed from the kernel configuration. As a result, it will no longer be possible to explicitly build new kernels for these older processors.
The decision fits into a broader trend in which outdated architectures are slowly disappearing from the Linux kernel. The last time such a step was taken was in 2012, when support for the 80386 was dropped. According to Linus Torvalds, it was already clear at that time that this type of hardware no longer plays a role in modern kernel development.
Old hardware wastes developers’ time
Molnar emphasizes that maintaining this legacy support is becoming increasingly difficult to justify. He argues that developers are still spending time on complex compatibility layers for very old 32-bit CPUs, even though these are hardly used in practice with recent kernels. According to him, this sometimes even leads to issues that need to be resolved, which comes at the expense of work on more relevant parts of the kernel.
Previously, Molnar proposed ending support indirectly by introducing new minimum hardware requirements, such as support for specific instructions missing on 486 processors. In the current version of the proposal, a more direct approach has been chosen by simply removing the configuration options.
Linux 7.1 is expected to be released sometime in the middle of the year, shortly after 7.0. Whether the patch will be definitively included is not yet certain, but the direction seems clear. Molnar notes that the practical impact will be limited, as recent kernel versions are effectively unusable on this old hardware. According to him, users still running such systems can continue to work with older kernel versions.
With this step, the end is in sight for support of a processor line that reached its peak more than three decades ago.