AMD K5 CPUs The Latest To Be Retired With Linux’s Aging & Stagnate Hardware Support
AMD K5 CPUs The Latest To Be Retired With Linux’s Aging & Stagnate Hardware Support
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-K5-CPUs
Publish Date: 2026-05-07 17:44:00
Source Domain: www.phoronix.com
Following Linux 7.1 beginning to phase out i486 CPU support and in turn drivers like those for the old AMD Elan SoCs now being removed, for Linux 7.2 the processor support removal is going further to now include some i586 and i686 class processors.
Following the i486 farewell, TSC-less i586/i686 processors are being removed. Supporting those vintage GPUs without the Time Stamp Counter “TSC” instruction are becoming a burden on Linux kernel developers and thus the support is being removed. TSC-capable Intel Pentium processors and the likes will still be supported with this just being for TSC-less i586/i686 CPUs.
Among the CPUs impacted by this latest change is the AMD K5 as well as various Cyrix processor models. The K5 was AMD’s first entirely in-house designed processor that was first introduced in 1996 to counter the Intel Pentium CPU.
This patch removing TSC-less CONFIG_M586 support for Linux was queued into tip/tip.git’s “x86/cpu” branch. With this removal patch now part of TIP’s x86/cpu branch, it’s expected to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 7.2 merge window.
With this removal, TSC support can now be assumed as a boot requirement for modern Linux with CONFIG_X86_TSC in turn going to be made unconditional and then being able to remove the various non-TSC code paths from the x86 code in the Linux kernel.
