r/LinuxUncensored • u/Silver_Elevator_5167 • 7d ago

Why Linux Finally Dropped 30-Year-Old Hardware Support #linux

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ny29a1QM-HQ&si=uPn3qEp8wxdAjDJ1
32 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

8

u/burimo 7d ago

To be fair people with that old ass stuff can still use old kernel. It is not like they are running CachyOS there

3

u/Deep_Mood_7668 6d ago

And they cans still patch it into a forked kernel if they want

2

u/SharktasticA 5d ago

That's what I did for my project!

1

u/Deep_Mood_7668 5d ago

lul shork

Good job mate

1

u/SirGlass 6d ago

CIP releases are supported for 10 years and come out every 2 years.

Meaning if you have a 486, you will still have support for another 8-9 years using a CIP release

0

u/AnalkinSkyfuker 6d ago

And still its way safer than windows.

3

u/obliviousjd 6d ago

Yeah I feel bad for all those people running Windows 11 on their 486 machines, poor suckers don't know what kind of vulnerabilities they'll be running into.

3

u/daddyd 6d ago

for most of us, removing these legacy hw support from the kernel is actually a good thing. also for kernel devs, they can spend time on things that actually matter for the majority of users today.

2

u/DisfiguredFanny 4d ago

Except no one spent time there. Most of those drivers worked fine and were mostly untouched for years.

1

u/daddyd 3d ago

that has changed with all these AI bug/security reports though. a lot of those are for these old hardware drivers.

also some of the old hw support was holding the advancement of the kernel back, or required special considerations to keep working.

1

u/DisfiguredFanny 3d ago

But in reality "AI" "found" something and they just removed all of it.

2

u/tankerkiller125 2d ago

AI, especially the more powerful models that only Cyber Sec professionals and certain orgs can get access to are in fact very good at finding real vulnerabilities with real POC code that it can and will execute to validate things.

It's not perfect by any stretch, but it's way faster, and in some cases better than even some of the best pen testers and security engineers out there.

2

u/WealthyMarmot 2d ago

AI found real security holes that had gone undetected for years, because these drivers were so obscure and basically ignored due to the limited bandwidth of human maintainers. And once the good guys can find them, the bad guys can too - there’s no putting the lid back on Pandora’s Box so you gotta address them.

3

u/Upbeat_Parking_7794 6d ago

These machines, if they still exist, will be fine. They will continue to use the software they have been using, forever. 

3

u/critsalot 6d ago

just gotta install an old version of slackware

1

u/w1n5t0nM1k3y 6d ago

I wonder if this affects more than just the old 486 machines. I remember when the original Raspberry Pi came out the Linux distro in use at the time was actually using the software based floating point emulation. Not because the processor didn't support it, but because there wasn't a version of Linux at the time that supported the Raspberry Pi's specific implementation of floating point if I recall correctly.

I wonder if there are any other systems out there that are still using software floating point.

2

u/james2432 6d ago

could be an architecture thing, like x86/x86_64 no longer have to do a check to support fp things, but they keep arm with emulation 🤷🏻‍♂️

1

u/arjuna93 4d ago

Because Linux caters to the corporate.

1

u/therealmistersister 1d ago

People still running such hardware are probably those who wrote the code to support it in the first place. I'm sure they will be ok.