How to Check If Your PC Uses an i486 or i586 Processor

If you execute Linux on 30-year-old equipment, lend me your ears: in recent weeks, the Linux kernel has been updated to no longer support the Intel 486 and 586 processors. Here is why this happens and how you can check the CPU in your device.

Why some CPUs lose support

The latest versions of the Linux kernel, the software underlying all Linux distributions, no longer support 80486 (or i486) and several “Pentium” processors 586 (i586) mainly due to the work involved in their continuous support. People who develop the Linux nucleus are, well, people. It became more and more restrictive to maintain compatibility, and the workload would prevail over the advantage, especially if we consider the few people who still use the processors now considered to be old.

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The i486 and i586 may not have been computer stars, but they were certainly in competition.

Linus Torvalds, inventor of the Linux nucleus, noted this as a problem in 2022, and it was only with the release of May of the nucleus 6.15 that the change was really made.

The management of these processors amounted to 15,000 lines of code which are now deleted in the last nuclei and no longer require the maintenance of the developers. Without this code, the Linux nucleus installed on one of these processors will not work, and you will be stuck with a very old brick of a computer.

Is your processor on the blocking?

This brings us to know if you should worry about the continuous support of your computer. The short answer is: almost certainly no.

The processors we are talking about made their debut in the late 80s and in the mid -90s. That said, i486 processors were always sold until 2007. If the computer you use is more recent than that, you have nothing to fear and you can help us use Linux on your computer in the predictable future.

If you do not know when your computer has been made, however, and you think it could contain one of the condemned processors, there are several ways to check the name of the CPU. Anyway, it will be a good simple exercise to make yourself comfortable with the terminal.

First of all, you can use the UNAME command with the -P or – processor option to see the type of your processor.

uname -p

Unfortunately, I don’t have one of these experienced processors to test this order. You can see in the release of my fairly modern computer, the result is “x86_64”, indicating that it has an X86 architecture with 64 -bit IT capacities. If I used one of the abandoned processors, my research tells me that the release would say something like “i486” or “i586”.

Another method is to use the LSCPU command to obtain the name of the model and other information on the installed CPU.

lscpu

The first entry for your processor information will display the architecture, which would be i486 or i586 if it is one of the unlucky.

However, you may have had to scroll through the terminal to find this information. As always, there are more effective ways to do things in the Linux terminal. You can filter directly for your architecture name using the GREP command.

lscpu | grep 'Arch'

Of course, there are generally graphic means of checking the processor. For example, on my plasma KDE desktop, I can launch the Settings application and look at the system administration> About this system, and it will show me a processor name.

Let’s be realistic, however: if you use a processor from the 80s or the mid -90s, you do not perform a recent edition of the Plasma office environment. Any graphic office can be out of the question for you. However, knowing where to find this information can be useful in many situations, as when buying or selling a used device.

Is it time for an upgrade?

If you are one of the few people who use one of these processors, there are good and bad news. The good news is that, unless you live on the software bleeding edge, it will take a while until the nucleus 6.15 is reaching you. Most Linux distros do not come with the last absolute nucleus.

For example, I just installed the latest version of Debian Linux, and at the time of writing, he always uses the nucleus 6.1.

However, It is not because a version of the nucleus officially supports a processor. In fact, Debian abandoned the support of the i486 and i586 processors almost a decade. If you have an i386 processor, however, we always recommend Debian Linux because it is one of the few distros that still maintains the management of the i386 processors.

Fortunately for people i486 and i586, at least two distros have not yet left you behind. Slackware and Knoppix are still claiming to support i486 and more recent processors. I cannot talk about the experience of how they operate in practice, but they are both well -established Linux distros in the community, having existed since at least in the early 2000s.

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Whenever you need to replace your old equipment, and you do not want to pay the market price just to have a computer, I recommend that you consult thrift stores and online markets for offers on computers used but always usable. A “new” retro PC version can be very fun and maybe easier than you think.