On Tue, 21 Oct 2014, Ben Hutchings wrote:
It appears that the stack protector depends on the TSC for initialisation. This is not implemented by the Intel 486 or its clones.
Oops. That suggests that there's an upstream problem as well, since the kernel configuration system shouldn't allow you to enable the stack protector without disabling 486 support.
We should perhaps have renamed the 486 flavour to 586 when enabling this feature, but it wasn't noticed at the time. It's a bit late to change the flavour name for jessie, as it is unfortunately used in many other places. I can at least correct the description.
This will also need an update to the Installation Guide, since it currently says that 486 processors are supported:
http://d-i.debian.org/manual/en.i386/ch02s01.html#idp6106384Will custom kernels running on 486es still be supported, or is Debian intending to desupport the 486 in userland as well?
-- Ben Harris