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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?
this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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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
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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.
"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..."
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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.
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. Old 16-bit bus with a max speed of around 5Mbps. That's why you'll occasionally see newish "industrial" motherboards that have ISA slots and parallel ports.
They also often have a lot of the hardware in stock and ready to deploy, to handle replacements.
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 - overlaying eye tracking data from Tobii eye trackers they provided (thousands of dollars each at the time) on top of screen recordings taken via VNC, to aid in training of air traffic controllers.
It was even more interesting to learn about some of their processes, though. Whenever they built an ATC computer 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. :)
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This is absurd! Think of all the 486 cpus that will become EWASTE! LINUX HATES THE ENVIRONMENT!
/s in case not obvious.
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
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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.
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.
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