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Debian farewells Pentium

Debian is farewelling a bunch of legacy processors, including Pentium.

While Linux may still be touted as the best way to keep an ancient PC on life support, there are limits, it seems.

As kernel developer Ben Hutchings explains in this post, Debian is inheriting the change from gcc, which no longer supports pre-686 architectures. Code compiled with gcc now crashes on non-686 processors.

The architectures on the end-of-life list are AMD K5 and K6 (including K6-2 and K6-3); DM&P/SiS Vortex86 and Vortex86SX; Cyrix III and MediaGX, MediaGX; IDT Winchip C6 and Winchip 2; Rise mP6; Via C3 “Samuel 2” and C3 “Ezra; and, of course, Intel Pentium and Pentium with MMX.

“Older processors will continue to be supported in jessie until at least 2018, and until 2020 if i386 is included in jessie LTS,” Hutchings writes. ®

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