Linux 7.2 has landed, dragging x86 timing clean out of the nineties by making the Time Stamp Counter mandatory.
I wrote up a quick article on why ditching those ancient legacy fallbacks is good housekeeping, plus a few other bits like cache-aware scheduling and memory tweaks worth noting.
Is anyone still using legacy hardware? If so, what do you use it for?
Just a quick reminder: NetBSD still has it and will very likely in the foreseeable future
It makes more sense to do this in a major upgrade like from kernel 6 to 7 but some cleanup is good.
major upgrade like from kernel 6 to 7
What do you mean? The Linux kernel doesn’t follow SemVer.
The 6.19 -> 7.0 version bump didn’t have any more inherent meaning than 7.0 -> 7.1 or 7.1 -> 7.2.
Yay, reduced functionality 🥳
My man were talking about hardware from like the 90s lol. Linux is amazing on keeping old hardware going, but even it has to move on at some point.
You know, Windows98 is still available
on archive.org
You spell ReactOS so weird.
I’m sure you’ll be devastated to learn that Linux stopped supporting the i386 in 2012.
Virtually nobody is going to run kernel 7.2 on a 90s CPU without a time stamp chip. Its good practice to prune old and largely unused features once and a while
With an ifdef.
Why on earth you are still relying on 30+ year old CPU’s? Are you a supermarket owner on a third world country?
Some people are.
Yeah God forbid the poor still use a secure and updated OS…
Yup. Linux isn’t what it used to be anymore.
You’re right, it’s way better.
You make it sound like no one can just go keep the older hardware alive by forking.
I love the “just fork it” argument.
Look, Elon, maybe we can’t solo a project like that if we’re still using old hardware, okay?
Sorry if that made you frown behind your shades. Ask the poolside waiter for a other cocktail.
The fairy tail of fork freedom, just the fairy tail of market freedom.
Y’all are really pathetic.
I’m not what I used to be
"downvotes won’t change the reality, corpo boot lickers
This happens every time I point put that losing these “old” kernel capabilities is in fact a loss.
Let them be stupid about it, all the code still exists to undo these bad decisions one day. It’ll just be more work than it would otherwise be to fix what they broke.
I put them in the same category as AI sycophants, they can’t see three feet beyond their own nose.
Short-sighted kids are a little more common after we fired the mentors and documenters in our field: they don’t know how or why we did such dumb things before and thus can’t avoid them. It’s like how America fired all its inspectors and now suffer en masse from salmonella and explosive diarrhea from tainted food: causal.
