Why are there only i686 and i586 Version of glibc and kernel?

[Alan Cox]

On Tue, Jun 01, 2004 at 03:24:15PM +0200, Leonard den Ottolander wrote:
> This issue was discussed in the thread "Making NPTL the default for FC3,
> vanilla i386 support". Both i386s and i486s are already no longer
> supported since FC 1. Try running rpm on either of these CPUs and see it
> fail. See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=103078 .

It depends which 486 variant, and its only rpm thata affected.

More relevantly, dropping 486 compatibility buys you nothing. The pentium
added no useful "essential" instruction that makes a big difference while the
486 added several features