Debian Drops Support for i386 and i586

[mlnews]

The Debian project is giving up on supporting the older, less powerful Intel 386 and Intel 586 (i486 was already dropped by accident) platforms within the IA32 family. Going forward Debian will continue to support the 32bit Intel Architecture, but only in its complete i686 (aka Pentium Pro) command set. So the use of Debian on i386, i486 and Pentium compatible processors will no longer be an option.

The Pentium Pro was the basis of the long running IA32 family that included processors such as the PPro itself, the Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium IIIs, Pentium M and the Core. The Netburst Architecture, commonly thought of as the Pentium IV and Pentium D, shares the i686 command set with the Pentium Pro family. So all post Pentium Pro processors will continue to be supported, including the Intel Atom, as well as their compatibles such as the 32bit AMD Athlon series, K6 and others.