A while back there was some debate about the Linux kernel dropping support for some very old GPUs. (I can’t remember the exact models, but they were roughly from the late 90’s)
It spurred a lot of discussion on how many years of hardware support is reasonable to expect.
I would like to hear y’alls views on this. What do you think is reasonable?
The fact that some people were mad that their 25 year old GPU wouldn’t be officially supported by the latest Linux kernel seemed pretty silly to me. At that point, the machine is a vintage piece of tech history. Valuable in its own right, and very cool to keep alive, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable for the devs to drop it after two and a half decades.
I think for me, a 10 year minimum seems reasonable.
And obviously, much of this work is for little to no pay, so love and gratitude to all the devs that help keep this incredible community and ecosystem alive!
And don’t forget to Pay for your free software!!!
the fact that it’s open and you can get old versions of the kernel. i say we are very lucky we get the support we get but ask long as that older version is still available abd opening means no e waste. even 386s
If there are no security updates, it does become ewaste because of severe vulnerability to all sorts of attacks that makes it unsuitable for most use cases. Though it’s still better than nothing.
It is not that simple.
For hardware attacks, older hardware are probably safe since the attacks are specifics to some newer features. I really doubt you can deliver a Spectre attack on anything up until the Pentium or even later.
On the software side, there could be some security bugs to which some older version could be vulnerable since there were not the vulnerable code at the time. Granted, there could be some security bugs that were not yet discovered in older codebase.
