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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

OpenBSD still builds releases for i386. I don't know for how much longer; they note that "Due to the increased usage of OpenBSD/amd64, as well as the age and practicality of most i386 hardware, only easy and critical security fixes are backported to i386. The project has more important things to focus on."

https://www.openbsd.org/i386.html

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Not all i386 in name are real 386. Sometimes they think about i586 or i686 (which is way how to mark generations of CPU).

From provided page:

Processors All CPUs compatible with the Intel Pentium or later, with Intel-compatible hardware floating point support should work.

So no support for real 386 CPU.

Nor the hordes of embedded 486 cores (the AMD Elan series, et al) that powered many of the first-gen 802.11b hardware.

Boo! I was very excited for half a minute.

Guess my 386sx-40 will stay DOS5 + WFW 3.11 + CalmiraXP + Win32s etc lol

OpenBSD dropped support for the 80386 around 2005, and the 80486 sometime later.

The arch name i386 doesn't actually mean 386.

Right. In this context, i386 really means the 32-bit x86 architecture, as opposed to 64-bit.

I don't know of any architectural differences that would require a Pentium over a 386 or 486 (besides a FPU.) The Pentium runs the same software in the same memory and address space, just faster. Unless something requires Pentium MMX or SSE instructions.

Things like CMOV were introduced in the pentium pro (i686), which often is the cut-off for reasonably modern OS support.

OpenBSD i386 (atom n270) user here runs fine. No Firefox, but I have Lynx/Links/Netsurf/Luakit and Seamonkey.

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