I don’t think this affects anything other than some really ancient machines from the 1990s which would struggle to have enough RAM to run modern Linux anyway. But the problem is I could be wrong about that and there could be embedded systems that do need modern updates due to internet exposure about or other systems running apparently old instruction sets all over the world. I don’t know so I would want to see a feedback site set up for people to say if they need this support and to estimate how many exist.
I guess that old hardware was always gonna go obsolete someday. I wonder how many are still in use
Very impressive the amount of years it was supported.
I remember running Linux on a 386er board with two(!) CPUs. Those were the times…
The patch series today though would end support for original i486 processors as well as early i586 processors. The kernel patches would remove support for CPUs lacking TSC and CX8/CMPXCHG8B capabilities. Basically this would put the minimum upstream Linux kernel support for 32-bit processors at the original Pentium CPU with CMPXCHG8B and Time Stamp Counter (TSC) support.
There were 586 CPUs that were not Pentiums? Article implies the original Pentium would be the new baseline, but then what 586 CPUs would lose support?
i very vaguely recall cyrix having a 586 but i can’t recall if it was drop in compatible or not - their chips were always bootleg quality as i remember it
Crazy to think that the concept of “bootleg quality” was even possible for a CPU.
The 80s-90s were indeed a crazy time.
There were 586 CPU that were not Pentiums?
There were a lot of Socket 7 CPUs. From VIA/AMD/IBM to a dozen of smaller alternatives I wouldn’t be able to recall already.
I believe i686 were the first Pentium chips.
They were named pent-ium because they were 586. Of course, the name lasted a lot longer than the technical reasons.
The Pentium Pro was i686.
Ah, that’s an interesting piece of information I just learned.
That’s a cool bit of computer science trivia.
I wonder if that new instructions are needed for anything useful.
Nah, they just had spare wafer space and wanted to fill it up with something, so they made up these instructions. No use beyond that has ever been found for them
I thought they already removed i486 support.
That was i386.