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?
Yeah God forbid the poor still use a secure and updated OS…
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. 🤣
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.