One point in favor of the sprawling Linux ecosystem is its broad hardware support—the kernel officially supports everything from ’90s-era PC hardware to Arm-based Apple Silicon chips, thanks to decades of combined effort from hardware manufacturers and motivated community members. But nothing can last forever, and for a few years now, Linux maintainers (including Linus Torvalds) have been pushing to drop kernel support for Intel’s 80486 processor. This chip was originally introduced in 1989, was replaced by the first Intel Pentium in 1993, and was fully discontinued in 2007. Code commits suggest that Linux kernel version 7.1 will be the first to follow through, making it impossible to build a version of the kernel that will support the 486; Phoronix says that additional kernel changes to remove 486-related code will follow in subsequent kernel versions. Although these chips haven’t changed in decades, maintaining support for them in modern software isn’t free. “In the x86 architecture we have various complicated hardware emulation facilities on x86-32 to support ancient 32-bit CPUs that very, very few people are using with modern kernels,” writes Linux kernel contributor Ingo Molnar in his initial patch removing 486 support from the kernel. “This compatibility glue is sometimes even causing problems that people spend time to resolve, which time could be spent on other things.” This echoes comments from Linus Torvalds in 2022, suggesting there was “zero real reason for anybody to waste one second of development effort” on 486-related problems. The removal of 486 support would also likely affect a handful of 486-compatible chips from other companies, including the Cyrix 5×86 and the Am5x86 from AMD. Molnar was also a driving force the last time Linux dropped support for an older Intel chip—support for the 80386 processor family was removed in kernel version 3.8 back in early 2013.
Continue reading the complete article on the original source
