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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.
this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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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.
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.
There is no budget for it AFAICT but there is https://github.com/abandonware and others trying to help on that path.
Probably not a lot of space savings, but certainly a reduction in complexity, which helps programmers keep everything together and frees their time to work on the newer stuff
This is absurd! Think of all the 486 cpus that will become EWASTE! LINUX HATES THE ENVIRONMENT!
/s in case not obvious.
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.
There's no way in hell 2007 was 18 years ago.
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) which is why you'll occasionally see newish "industrial" motherboards that have ISA slots and parallel ports.
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 - usage of eye tracking and screen recording via VNC for training of air traffic controllers - but it was even more interesting to learn about some of their processes.
Whenever they built an ATC 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. :)
Dude when those emails came out and we saw the engineer talking about how he wouldn’t let his own family fly on one to another engineer when asked…truly slackjawed moment.
WTF can you link this?
"My baby, you have blossomed into a wonderful adult. It's time to stop relying on us now, though. Go on and do big things, or something..."
Whew. My 586 is safe.
For now
I remember when Mandrake was a young distro -- a redhat derivative -- and they (gasp) chose to compile for i586 instead of i386. People were like VROooooOM! And a bunch of other people were like: why would you target CPU instructions that not everyone has?!
I switched to Mandrake for that (back in the day).
for now
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...
I never owned a 486 either. My first upgrade after the 286 was a Pentium.
Boo.
Me neither but I did own an 6502 based compy.
My first PC was a Pentium 2 though.
i like this. hardware should be the least disposable as possible, as long as there is manpower to maintain it. as long as theres people still using it fruitfully, its not trash.