Published on: 2025-07-19 16:13:49
This is my battle-worn, falling-apart laptop rocking an #i486SX CPU from the early ’90s. It’s so ancient that it doesn’t even have an FPU (Actually, that’s not true, they just cut-out FPU from i486DX to make CPU cheaper)! Anyway, I’ve always dreamed of running a modern UNIX-like OS on it. So, I spent some time resurrecting math emulation in the #NetBSD-10.x kernel, and guess what? I did it! But here’s the kicker—the very moment I finished compiling the kernel, ready to test my work, my laptop
Keywords: 2025 fpu just netbsd upd
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-08-11 17:04:13
FPU Emulation Revival for i486SX on NetBSD This retro-computing project restores support for x87 floating-point unit (FPU) emulation in the NetBSD kernel, targeting legacy 486SX-class processors without hardware FPUs. It brings back the original MATH_EMULATE option into NetBSD 10.x and beyond, as well as reverts and reworks the changes introduced in commit dfe83e0, which removed FPU emulation support from the kernel. Disclaimer This project is a work in progress and may contain bugs or incomp
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