On Sat, Sep 20, 2025 at 09:42:29AM -0400, Nick Holland wrote: > In all cases, the system firmware is what loads the kernel, so the system > firmware > has to understand how to access the disk where the kernel resides. IF you > had a > really old 486 that had enough memory and you put a 500GB disk on it, you > might > find that the system couldn't load the kernel beyond 8GB or even 504MB.
Recent versions of OpenBSD i386 likely wouldn't boot on a real hardware 80486. If I'm reading it correctly, the i386 clock init code tries to use the rdtsc opcode, which wasn't supported on any actual 80486 cpus. (Emulators set to '80486' may or may not allow it to boot, depending on how authentic the emulation is.)
