I didn’t know whether to mark this NSFW or not but it’s time to buy a new computer if you haven’t upgraded in multiple decades.
This is absurd! Think of all the 486 cpus that will become EWASTE! LINUX HATES THE ENVIRONMENT!
/s in case not obvious.
That’s a real showcase of how linux actually cares about its users over other companies. It’s great to see that hardware I buy now will be supported on linux for a long long time into the future.
I’m kind of shocked that it’s only been 18 years since the last 486 chip was made. It was launched in 1989 and discontinued in 2008, while the original Pentium was launched in 1993 and discontinued in 1999. Hell, the Pentium 4 was discontinued in 2007.
It’s quite incredible, and very interesting. I wonder why they continued to produce these CPUs.
Probably for industrial machines.
Yup. Airplanes, for example, take a lot of validation. It’s extremely expensive to retest a new configuration, so they make one computer, get it validated, and use it unmodified for the next thirty years.
This is why the Boeing Max 8 thing was a big deal. They made approved modifications, but found in rare conditions it could cause unexpected and dangerous flight conditions. But, a times b times c was estimated to be less than the cost of doing it properly, so they didn’t.
Same with industrial automation. There’s some robotic arms, assembly lines, etc in use today that still use PCs with ISA slots - the predecessor to PCI, which was the predecessor to PCIe. Old 16-bit bus with a max speed of around 5Mbps. That’s why you’ll occasionally see newish “industrial” motherboards that have ISA slots and parallel ports.
They also often have a lot of the hardware in stock and ready to deploy, to handle replacements.
A project I worked on at university (way back in 2010) was for one of the largest providers of air traffic control systems. Our project was interesting - overlaying eye tracking data from Tobii eye trackers they provided (thousands of dollars each at the time) on top of screen recordings taken via VNC, to aid in training of air traffic controllers.
It was even more interesting to learn about some of their processes, though. Whenever they built an ATC computer system for a client, they’d build one or two spares at the same time, with exactly identical hardware. They did this for two reasons:
- If the hardware breaks down, they can supply a new system that exactly matches the hardware that was verified.
- If a client has an issue with their system, they can try and replicate the issue on a clone of that client’s system.
We got to see a storage room with a large number of these systems. Lots of different PCs anywhere from a month to maybe 15 years old. :)
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Isn’t that the employee who was found dead like a week later? You know, the one Boeing killed?
WTF can you link this?
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Yeah, the amount of industrial machinery being controlled by ancient hardware would baffle a lot of people.
For a comparison people might relate to: There are ATMs running twenty year old versions of Windows XP.
There are still ATMs running OS/2 and probably lots of POS systems running DOS.
Processors of that age still exist in special builds, like tougher ones for automotive use with lots of heat and vibration, or radiation-hardened ones for space use where you can’t dispatch a technician. But for consumers use, they’re long dead.
There’s no way in hell 2007 was 18 years ago.
Time is weird. A few years ago, I would have agreed. Now I feel that everything from March 2020 to now was just yesterday, and everything before covid is ancient history
I think you can still buy new 486 compatible chips today.
but what abt my 386SX tho
Whew. My 586 is safe.
Nooooooooo my…wait I’ve never actually owned a 486. Carry On.
Yeah, me neither… I moved from an 8088 (8Mhz) to a 386dx (40Mhz) directly to a Pentium 90Mhz… Skipped the 486…
First they came for 486, and I did not speak out - because I’ve never actually owned a 486…
I think it should be possible to still run Linux on almost every 25 years old computer.
If the computer is older than this, it really becomes a piece of history and I can accept that it’d take efforts from the user to keep it in use, just like a collection car.
I only hope no bricking update is gonna be proposed to the people running such old hardware. The distribution should check if the hardware is compatible with a newer kernel before updating.
Still I think it’s important that Linux remains the OS of choice for old hardware and that the some distros remain deficated to these museum pieces.
If anyone is actually using a 486 still, you can try using the kernels that the CIP maintains https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/cip/linux-cip.git They actually still support kernel 4.4
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Linux newb here. So I’m assuming this would make the kernel smaller, and take up less space. Would it be significant?
The Linux kernel is well over 30 million lines of code (lots of that is drivers).
This change shrinks the kernel by about 15,000 lines. That is not nothing, but it hardly moves the needle.
It is just one less thing to have to worry about and one less constraint to limit flexibility in the future.
It’s probably less about making the kernel smaller and more about security and reviewing code. The less code you have to maintain, the fewer vulnerabilities even if it’s old code.
I would doubt almost 20 year-old code is taking up a lot of space or presenting new vulnerabilities. And it’s obviously open source so if anyone needs it, they can always use an older kernel or maintain it. Sometimes, your oldest code is insane. I wish there was a budget for every company and government to pay retirees part time to go back over their oldest code that’s still in use. A lot of retired programmers would do it for fun and nostalgia. And to be horrified something they wrote 20 years ago hasn’t been updated or replaced.
