If Capitalism is ruining Linux somebody should tell Lunduke we need more wokeness in open source.
What hardware did they remove? Because last I remember they were dropping 486 support, and complaining about that is kind of a bad joke.
@cjd Shitposting aside, I would genuinely like to know from someone like @retroedgetech how big a deal removing these old CPUs is.
But the other removals I saw had to do with older peripherals that nobody came up to help maintain.
I do not think it is a big deal that support for those old 486 CPUs is being removed from the current Linux kernel.
I think no one is asking to be able to run the latest Linux 7.** kernel on a 486.
People who are running that hardware are very likely on older versions on Linux (or other retro operating systems) and not looking to run the latest Linux anyway.
However, on the other side of the argument, why remove it? I do not believe there are any pressing security issues with keeping the code that supports those CPUs. If there are problems, they could just be left with notices of what doesn't work for the three people in the world that may affect.
I don't really think it matters either way.
If someone wants to run a current OS on a 486, there's NetBSD.
... but I do not think we should expect to run a current OS on a CPU that old. That's what the 'retro computing' genre is about. Just run an old OS on that hardware.
#retro #Linux #NetBSD
I think no one is asking to be able to run the latest Linux 7.** kernel on a 486.
People who are running that hardware are very likely on older versions on Linux (or other retro operating systems) and not looking to run the latest Linux anyway.
However, on the other side of the argument, why remove it? I do not believe there are any pressing security issues with keeping the code that supports those CPUs. If there are problems, they could just be left with notices of what doesn't work for the three people in the world that may affect.
I don't really think it matters either way.
If someone wants to run a current OS on a 486, there's NetBSD.
... but I do not think we should expect to run a current OS on a CPU that old. That's what the 'retro computing' genre is about. Just run an old OS on that hardware.
#retro #Linux #NetBSD
In the particular case of CPUs, there are very good reasons to stop supporting them if they're too annoying and the userbase is not large enough.
Linus recently wrote up a list of all of the ways a CPU can be a total piece of shit - which trickles down to the kernel having to be architected in a certain way just to deal with scenarios that can really never happen on any sane architecture...
https://lkml.org/lkml/2025/10/1/1140
Linus recently wrote up a list of all of the ways a CPU can be a total piece of shit - which trickles down to the kernel having to be architected in a certain way just to deal with scenarios that can really never happen on any sane architecture...
https://lkml.org/lkml/2025/10/1/1140
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@cjd @gabriel @retroedgetech @matthew CPUs I get, but for stuff like mice and keyboards, I don't understand. I've always used old peripherals on new computers.
Whoever makes the changes is responsible for making them everywhere they're needed, but if nobody is around to even test the driver and year after year it just keeps getting updated by people who are making updates to the entire codebase and they need to touch that driver... Eventually nobody even knows if it works or not, and then they decide to pull it out of the tree and somewhere someone complains...