End of an Era – Linus Removes .386 CPU Support
Linux was first developed by Linus on an old .386 system, way back in 1991, and now that cord has been cut, and .386 CPUs are no longer supported:
From the comments:
Pull “Nuke 386-DX/SX support” from Ingo Molnar:
“This tree removes ancient-386-CPUs support and thus zaps quite a bit
of complexity:
24 files changed, 56 insertions(+), 425 deletions(-)
… which complexity has plagued us with extra work whenever we wanted
to change SMP primitives, for years.
Unfortunately there’s a nostalgic cost: your old original 386 DX33
system from early 1991 won’t be able to boot modern Linux kernels
anymore. Sniff.”
I’m not sentimental. Good riddance.
My first ‘home’ Linux system – in 1997 – was an HP Vectra 486 – 50Mhz CPU, with 512k memory, and a 1.2GB disk drive. Red Hat 4.2 – Kernel 2.0.36..(IIRC..). I remember having to patch the later 2.2 kernel, to get USB support, using a patch ‘backported’ from the development version 2.3..
Robert Gadsdon. December 12th, 2012..
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