Supporting older hardware

Posted Sep 16, 2008 11:51 UTC (Tue) by Cato (guest, #7643)
Parent article: KS2008: Linux 3.0

I agree with Linus's point about older hardware - schools, charities, developing countries can really make use of older hardware with modern distros like SliTaz, Ubuntulite, Puppy, etc.

In fact the same goes for individuals who want to use older systems as secondary computers. I have only just thrown out a 12 year old 486 laptop that was a Linux firewall in its later years, and I still sometimes use Ethernet cards of similar vintage in other laptops.

Supporting older hardware

Posted Sep 17, 2008 8:04 UTC (Wed) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link] (13 responses)

but what's wrong with using an equally ancient kernel for this hardware?

Supporting older hardware

Posted Sep 17, 2008 11:06 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (4 responses)

Bugs obviously. Specially security ones.

Supporting older hardware

Posted Sep 17, 2008 11:56 UTC (Wed) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (1 responses)

Only if you think that the newer kernels do not have security bugs, which seems not to be the case. On the other hand, contemporary crackers, script kiddies might look for only newer bugs and miss the old ones.

Anyway, as far as I know, some bugs in the 2.4.x series are still being fixed. I guess that 2.4.<late> would run on the same hardware as the more than 7 years old 2.4.0.

Supporting older hardware

Posted Sep 18, 2008 6:57 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

new kernels may have new bugs, but they also fix a lot of old bugs.

yes, most bugs that are being fixed were introduced durng the 2.6 days, that could be because there have been more lines of code writen for 2.6 then for all prior kernels combined (I don't know that for sure, but with the pace of development that's happening in 2.6 I would not at all be surprised)

Supporting older hardware

Posted Sep 17, 2008 12:02 UTC (Wed) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link] (1 responses)

Last I looked, 2.4.36.7 was only released recently. Many of the current security bugs have only been introduced in the 2.6 series, so some people even prefer the stable and tried 2.4 for security reasons. If you want to use your 80286, it might be fully sufficient.

Supporting older hardware

Posted Sep 17, 2008 14:21 UTC (Wed) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

> If you want to use your 80286, it [2.4] might be fully sufficient.

LOL. 16-bit processor without an MMU. ELKS supports it, but (a) ELKS is moribund and (b) it never tracked mainline Linux security updates.

Probably better off with minix 1.x.

Supporting older hardware

Posted Sep 17, 2008 14:46 UTC (Wed) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link] (5 responses)

That seems like a silly question: the same thing that's wrong with an ancient kernel for recent hardware! The lack of all the new features!

Are you assuming that the only reason people ever upgrade kernels is for new hardware drivers?

Supporting older hardware

Posted Sep 18, 2008 11:30 UTC (Thu) by canatella (subscriber, #6745) [Link] (4 responses)

Well If I'm running on older hardware, I know that I won't be able to use the fancy new features...

Man, I'm forced to run on an 2.2 kernel. It's a pity, I don't even have usb hotplug support... Wait, I don't have usb on my 133Mhz pentium!

Supporting older hardware

Posted Sep 18, 2008 14:39 UTC (Thu) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link] (3 responses)

"Are you assuming that the only reason people ever upgrade kernels is for new hardware drivers?"

Well If I'm running on older hardware, I know that I won't be able to use the fancy new features...

I'll take that answer as a "yes" to my question. Perhaps you do not realize some of the other nifty things that kernels do besides support hardware, especially the linux kernel? :)

If I have old hardware, do you think I do not want?:

New advanced more robust filesystems (ext3/4, xfs, jfs, reiserfs, fuse, unionfs, brtfs, glusterfs...)
New networking protocol support, iptables...
Security fixes/new security models (SELinux, apparmor...)
Improved schedulers, i/o, process, elevators...
Improved block management features, lvm2, drbd, nbd, iscsi...
Performance improvements (futexs, pipe io, select/poll........)
Real time improvements, low latency...
Containerazation support
User api improvements .......
General bug fixes ......

In fact, I am embarrassed to say that I probably haven't even touched the tip of the iceberg of non hardware features that someone with an old kernel might want since I am too ignorant. But, surely you should be able to realize that newer kernels in linux mean a lot more than newer hardware support!

Supporting older hardware

Posted Sep 23, 2008 2:10 UTC (Tue) by unaiur (guest, #3563) [Link] (2 responses)

Do you have tried all those fancy features in a 66Mhz 80486? Fedora doesn't boot up. RedHat Linux 9.0 is ssssslllllooooowwww. The best mainstream OS for that machine is a RedHat 7.2 based on 2.4.x kernel. Period.

Supporting older hardware

Posted Sep 23, 2008 13:57 UTC (Tue) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link] (1 responses)

Hmm, isn't that the whole point of the discussion, whether an effort should be made to support older hardware or not? Your argument is a little bit circular, "it doesn't work, therefore, do not make it work"?

Supporting older hardware

Posted Jan 12, 2009 10:57 UTC (Mon) by Blaisorblade (guest, #25465) [Link]

The point is not circular. It is "it does not work and nobody with development skills care enough, so don't make it work".

Except that there are contemporary lightweight distributions, even if sometimes not based on glibc. Indeed, glibc bloat is probably the reason for which new distros are slow. The kernel isn't light either - Matt Mackall has been working on Linux-tiny, but most developers are happy to trade memory for speed, from the point of view of a 486 user, and they are indeed right: by current standards, nobody would say they trade memory for speed so easily :-).

Supporting older hardware

Posted Sep 20, 2008 19:23 UTC (Sat) by jlokier (guest, #52227) [Link]

Features and drivers come in handy.

Ancient hardware with a USB port can talk to modern USB devices - if you have the driver which only exists in a modern kernel.

Ancient hardware does new-fangled iptables rules and other IP tricks very nicely. Not fast, but it works.

Even filesystem improvements are good on ancient hardware.

Supporting older hardware

Posted Sep 21, 2008 21:11 UTC (Sun) by csamuel (✭ supporter ✭, #2624) [Link]

Because you are then tied into running an equally old distro, and I want to be able to run a
current distro on my quad processor PentiumPro box..