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I got it running as a VM guest on QEMU+KVM, exposing only a 486 CPU profile with 256 MB RAM, and it was still usable (with terminal, file manager, and some light web browsing). Looking at the system's memory usage though, it appears that going much lower than about 200 MB RAM would probably make it quite difficult to use (at least without relying on swap, which could make it even more miserable depending on the device being used there).

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That only fakes some cpuid flags. KVM cannot blacklist specific instructions or emulate idiosyncrasies of specific vintage CPUs.

Yeah, that's a good point. As a further experiment, I tried with various "hardware" combinations (from 486's to Pentium II's) in 86Box, which actually performs such emulation, but unfortunately I haven't been able to get it to boot properly (kernel panics during initialization, if it gets that far at all).

You can run bare qemu without kvm, there's a fag to disable it.

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