Re: What old Linux distro to run on a old Pentium III PC?

At Mon, 23 Jun 2025 16:43:35 GMT Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote:

 
On 2025-06-23, Robert Heller <heller@deepsoft.com> wrote:
 

I don't know if the software floating point code is still in the kernel, so
likely at least a '486 might be needed for "modern" kernels.  The original
'386 lacked a FP unit, although some '386 motherboards included a '387 (FP
unit).

 
Just out of curiosity, what sort of kernel operations would need
floating point?  (Aside from fancy GUIs, anyway.)

Probably not the kernel itself, but many random user-mode applications will
have floating point code. Early kernels "traped" unimplemented [on bare 80386
and 80487 systems] FP instructions and did software floating point. I don't
believe the various compilers (and certainly not the math libs) compile
floating point code using emulation, at least not by default. Asside from very
low-level MCUs, almost all processors, partitularly any 32 or 64 bit processor
with a MMU (read: processors capabible of running in Linux) have hardware
floating point. And even ARM Cortex M0 and M4 processors (eg the sorts of
processors on Arduino-type boards) have hardware floating point.

 
(In my 50-year career, I can count the number of times I've used
floating point on the fingers of one hand.  Yes, I do have an
integer square root algorithm...)
 

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