5.3 on Intel 386 ?

[Scott Long]

Brian Szymanski wrote:
>>Note that you will need a hardware FPU (i387 math co-pro).
>>FreeBSD 4.x supports math emulation, so you don't need a
>>hardware FPU there, but apparently theffort to phase 80386 support out of the OS.  It's been nearly 20at support has been
>>removed in FreeBSD 5.x.
> 
> 
> Out of curiosity, what happened to this code?
> 
> Was there some incompatibility, did it have the wrong license, etc?
> 
> Cheers,
> Brian
> 

Both FPU emulators were removed about a year ago as part of the gradual
effort to phase 80386 support out of the OS.  It's been nearly 20
years since the 80386 family was launched, and it's getting pretty long
in the tooth.  The tradeoffs for supporting both modern processors and
the 386 are pretty ugly, and we'd really like to focus on making modern
processors perform well rather than keeping very ancient processors
running.  6.0 is not going to have any 80386 support at all, so consider
this another sign to either upgrade your hardware or consider an older
FreeBSD release (2.2.x ?) for your needs.

Scott