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?
Some people are.
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.
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.
Yes, clean it up and sell it as a “vintage gaming PC”. You can get some good money for them now. You won’t get a couple grand unless it’s something rare though.
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
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.
Omg. You people are ridiculous. 🤣
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.
Like they would run on a i368 or i468 cpu. They run pentium 2, at least. And guess what, those are still supported ( basically pentium 1 and up )