What Intel CPU can ELKS scale up to?

[floriangit]

As per https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Phasing-Out-i486, Linux plans to get rid of another old support CPU line, i486.

I only use ELKS on my 286 and seldomly run it on qemu. What if one would run it on a 386 (SX/DX), 486, Pentium, and so on?

[ghaerr]

Hello @floriangit,

ELKS runs well on any of the Intel x86 CPUs that support real mode, which is all the older ones. Any PC compatible that (still) supports MBR boot (instead of the modern UEFI boot) should run ELKS. The kernel and all the applications assume only an 8086 instruction set, which is backwards compatible with real mode on these systems. If the system is 386+, then ELKS can take advantage of the "unreal" mode processor extension to access 16MB main memory, as well.

[floriangit]

Thanks @ghaerr - as always - I learned something today :-)