Linux 7.2 has landed, dragging x86 timing clean out of the nineties by making the Time Stamp Counter mandatory.
I wrote up a quick article on why ditching those ancient legacy fallbacks is good housekeeping, plus a few other bits like cache-aware scheduling and memory tweaks worth noting.
Is anyone still using legacy hardware? If so, what do you use it for?
Why on earth you are still relying on 30+ year old CPU’s? Are you a supermarket owner on a third world country?
Some people are.
I’m pretty sure any Rpi is more powerful, smaller, and more efficient than any computer hardware from 30 years ago lol.
True, but imagine the cost of having to set that up as a third world market owner
Less than the cost of the power of running a 35 year old CPU for a year I’m pretty sure. They still have to pay for electricity in the third world. And wages. If your employees take a bunch of extra time to do really simple things on the computer, that also costs money.
Could also probably get a couple grand for a working i486 PC at this point, it’s a museum piece.
Maybe, but I think that they will not upgrade the system, even without this change there is no reason to use a 7.x kernel on a 30+ Yeats old hardware
No - nobody is still using one that would be running a modern distro. Anyone relying on hardware this old is already managing their own ecosystem of software.
We’re talking about computers that have clock speeds in the megahertz range FFS. They’re slower than an ESP32 and take a lot more power.
Nothing of value was lost.
Yeah God forbid the poor still use a secure and updated OS…
No “poors” are running a 486. You would take the best part of and hour to boot a modern distro on a 66MHz (that’s 0.066GHz for you kids) 486. That’s if it would boot at all - which it likely wouldn’t.
Like they would run on a i368 or i468 cpu. Thats pentium 2, at least. And guess what, those are still supported ( basically pentium 1 and up )
If you’re using a 30+ year old computer in the modern day, you’ve already sacrificed security.
The price and availability of a 15 year old computer is almost the same as a 30 year old computer, you can get a fully functional 1st gen i5 PC that will sprint circles around the highest end 90’s PC for $40. Honestly, most people are just e-wasting computers that old, I’m sure you could easily get them for free, hell, lots of people would pay you to take them off their hands.
i486 is an antique now. It’s an artifact more expensive than less-ancient PCs.
It would require quite an expert to setup with a 7.X kernel, especially with network access.
I’m all for old hardware support, but there’s basically no scenario where this hurts anyone struggling to get by.
Omg. You people are ridiculous. 🤣
Utilities still use them. If it’s not broke, why fix it.
Those devices also don’t get updated, touched or fucked with. So any changes to newer kernels matter as much as as the answer to what fucking dirt taste like.
It literally doesn’t. So being mad at the removal is fucking retarded.
Hey sir, supermarket owners in 3rd world countries use newer stuff, no need to shit on us as if we were still living in the stone age.
Only George RR Martin in his little old Wordstar word processor would run on a 486 computer with DOS. And I doubt he is a Linux user, or if he is making updates to make his Kernel up-to-date with the current releases.