Linux 6.15 for 486

Rumors were circulating that i486 support would be dropped for the Linux kernel with version 6.15 that was released some days ago. It seems the support still remains, since I was able to build and run a 6.15 kernel on a 486DX system.

I used nearly the same steps as in my earlier experiments. Once again using Slackware 15.0 with GCC 11.2 as the base for building the toolchain. One important thing I needed to include this time was system wide support for 64-bit time_t. Initially using 32-bit time_t with this setup was a source of some strange bugs and weird behaviour.

I tried to use up-to-date versions of software for the toolchain and ended up with the following specific versions for everything:
* linux-6.15
* gcc-15.1.0
* busybox-1.37.0
* uClibc-ng-1.0.52
* binutils-2.44

The necessary scripts and configuration to build everything can be downloaded here. This time I have also included a script to build ncurses version 6.5 and the snake game I made a long time ago. There is also a script to conveniently launch QEMU for test.

The scripts should be executed in the following order:

./build-base.sh
./ncurses-build.sh
./snake-build.sh
./rootfs-cramfs.sh
./qemu-test.sh
          

Here is a screenshot: