Sad News For Those Who Depend On Retro Hardware To Show Off Their Elan
So long Cyrix support, as Linux 7.2 continues winnowing away at support for decades old hardware. Roughly a month ago Linux dropped support for i486 processors, first released back in 1989 and now the newest kernel does the same for i586 and i686. If that nomenclature is a little confusing, you are likely only in your 30’s or 40’s as those instruction sets date back to 1995. The i686 was also called Intel Pentium Pro and Celeron, once famous for being an overclocker’s dream; while it existed along with the Cyrix 6×86 they were not quite the same beast although this cull includes Cyrix.
It was also the time of AMD’s K5 and Athlon processors, a very interesting time in computer history and if you’re curious you can dive down a Wikipedia hole, watch us ramble on the PCPer Podcast or ask a greybeard if you know one. All of these three companies old chips will be losing support on Linux 7.2, with only rare Pentium Pro CPUs which supported Time Stamp Counter instructions continuing to be supported.
This will come as bad news for classic hardware enthusiasts, people going to extremes to pay for DDR4 or DDR5, and anyone who tries to update that ancient box sitting on the network that no one knows what it does, other than take down that entire network if it gets powered off. It makes sense to trim down support for 30 year old hardware, but it somehow seems against the original spirit of Linux, which apocryphally was compatible with even dead badgers.
If you are running such archaic hardware, ponder carefully before updating.
