Comment Re:Most software has phased out pre sse2 cpus (Score 4, Interesting) 154
But I'm going to wager outside of pretty specialized industrial and lab hardware, and a few hobbyists, this isn't going to have any impact at all. Heck, what's the last version of Windows to even run on a 486? My hunch is Windows ME and Windows 2000.
In the SBC/SOC world, Free DOS and MS DOS are king.
Windows 95/98 are trivial to run on a 486 with full DOS support, but isn't common due to the RAM requirements. Windows compact still works fine.
Anything with an NT kernel would be both surprising and very specialized indeed.
At that level the more common options are Linux, QNX, OS/2, and VxWorkx instead.
That said, you're quite right that this will have little to no impact.
Embedded systems are still manufactured with the 486 core. It's an easily implemented core and licensing it is surprisingly affordable.
However these systems are rarely network facing in any way a kernel security patch would be helpful.
We already custom built user-lands since their purpose is very different from what desktop distros aim for.