Almost four years ago, Linus Torvalds said there was no practical reason to keep supporting the 486 architecture. A year ago, he repeated that it was time to drop it. Now, concrete steps are being taken as Linux leaves another layer of legacy x86 hardware behind.
In a fresh merge for Linux 7.1, Torvalds pulled x86 platform updates, removing support for M486, M486SX, and AMD Elan processors. The merge commit lists this removal first, ahead of smaller DMI and AMD AGESA updates in the same batch.
The practical change is straightforward. In arch/x86/Kconfig.cpu, the kernel’s processor-family help text no longer says users can choose 486 for the broadest 32-bit x86 compatibility. It now says 586, and the note below was updated to state that both 386 and 486 are no longer supported. The same section explicitly mentions AMD Elan among the dropped older CPU families.
Additionally, the patch also deletes the old M486SX, M486, and MELAN configuration entries entirely. This is not just wording cleanup. The kernel is removing the actual processor-family build targets for those chips.
The change also affects several x86 defaults and dependency checks. The minimum CPU family default for 32-bit x86 moves from 4 to 5, shifting the baseline from 486-class to 586-class processors. Related conditionals were cleaned up to drop references to the removed 486 and Elan options.
For most Linux users, this changes nothing. Modern distributions have long moved beyond 486-era hardware. But upstream kernel support still matters symbolically, especially in a project known for carrying old architecture code for a long time.
The same merge also includes two smaller platform updates: printing the AGESA string from a DMI additional information entry on AMD systems, and a set of DMI code fixes and cleanup changes. These are part of the same x86 platform pull, but the removal of 486 and AMD Elan support is the headline change.
Finally, to put it simply for our readers, 486 processors belong to the early 1990s PC era. These include chips like Intel’s 486DX2, a processor line that predates USB, Wi-Fi, multicore CPUs, and the modern Linux desktop by many years. In other words, this hardware dates to before Windows 95, making the kernel’s long-running support for it notable.
Bye Bye Adios!!
My first ever PC was a Packard Bell 486DX2, running at 66 MHz (I think).
Way way back to 1994 or so. The Pentium CPU was already out, but I got the 486 to pay less.
It would take a long time before I switched to Linux for my personal computing (2002), but I still remember that scrappy PC….I think it had Windows 3.1, with the Packard Bell Navigator Shell running on top of that
@ Phil
> I would just go without using a pc if i had to use something that slow and ancient.
Sounds like someone never used 300 baud before.
I would just go without using a pc if i had to use something that slow and ancient.