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?
Lots of retro enthusiasts still use legacy hardware for all sorts of reasons… I fear that a fork of the kernel will be necessary in the near future to keep these machines running.
The notion of using Linux to revive old hardware and keep it out of the landfill may not last forever…
Or just don’t connect to the public internet and continue using a kernel that works? Even with internet, the attack vectors for such a machine are nearly non existent.
And why do they need to use the latest Linux kernel for that hardware, again?
Security updates if you use it online or copy new binaries to run on it. Even if you’re not worried about hackers, there can still be viruses and malware that destroy your data.
There are LTS versions outside of current.
But more importantly, who runs anything remotely critical on a 486 these days? These machines choke to death on TLS handshakes.
Industrial machine controllers frequently run on ancient hardware
And they are very notoriously outdated in terms of software.
There are ultra long term support Linux kernels though.
Linux 6.12 will be supported until at least 2036 for instance.
I do agree. Maybe I’m little paranoid, but I feel like in some years, recycle old chips will be the only IT available
Just use NetBSD and never look back :)
Linux supports much less old hardware than its competitors.
On the other hand, Linux runs more software than its competitors, and it’s not even close.
But NetBSD and FreeBSD can run Linux software as well?
Emulation support doesn’t imply full ABI or driver support.
Otherwise, since Proton is supported for Linux but not BSD, Linux would still be ahead.
It’s much deeper than emulation like you would a PlayStation. Last time I checked you could run steam and proton on FreeBSD
I know how it works. My point is that, if emulated software, be under a hypervisor or an ABI compatibility layer, is considered “supported”, then we could say that Windows applications are supported in Linux, but that’s not entirely true.
More importantly, if I want to run Linux software, I would rather run it on Linux, e.g. Docker and Kubernetes.
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted?
NetBSD
OpenBSD