The modern Linux was launched on a computer 25 years ago. The system loaded for ten minutes and turned off five more

Engineer EO Hyun Men from Singapore was able to install and start the modern Gentoo Linux distribution on a computer released 25 years ago. About why he needed this, and what happened, Yo Hyun Men told in his blog.

The Singapore engineer was interested in what the oldest processor of the X86 family supports the modern Linux core. In 2012, the core developers announced that Linux stops supporting the i386 processors - based on this, we could conclude that now the core supports the I486 processors and above.

Yo Hyun Men successfully installed Gentoo Linux on an IBM computer, published in 1993. Inside the computer there were a processor from AMD - a clone of i486 and 64 megabytes of RAM.

As expected, the system worked very slowly: the computer turned on for almost 11 minutes, and turned off five and a half. But on it we managed to listen to music, launch a web server and perform a simple program on Python.

To install Linux on a 25-year-old device, I had to use a modern laptop-on it, EO Hyun Men compiled all the programs, that is, he transferred them from the source code into a form understandable to the computer (this process would take too much time).

In addition, the computer supported the installation of operating systems only from the internal hard disk and with a floppy disk; The engineer had to use the emulator diset, which loaded the information from the memory card.

In his blog, EO Hyun Men notes that the I486 processors and their analogues are not subject to the vulnerabilities of Meltdown and Specter, which became known in early January, they appeared only in more modern processors models. “If you want to protect yourself from these attacks, you can run modern programs on the 486th processor,” the engineer joked.