On Tue, 29 Apr 2014 13:36:31 +0200, Joël BERTRAND wrote: > sun4u : kernel is stable until 2.6.32. [...] > > sun4v : I have several T1000 for a long time. I haven't seen any stable > kernel on these servers. Maybe someone could think about a k*bsd-sparc port ;) Linux seems to be dropping, or worsening in its support for, old hardware, and some other things: reiserfs and ufs for example are going away post-wheezy. It makes sense, if the old code becomes a burden to maintain and few people still test it. systemd takes a similar attitude to obsoleting old software interfaces. But I'm of the opinion that 'ideal' code should not bitrot: new interfaces should extend or complement existing ones, drivers should be maximally self-contained with no dependencies on kernel internals. Code for legacy hardware ought to be skipped at runtime with ideally just a single conditional branch somewhere with practically no overhead. Dropping support for old hardware sounds like a substitute for the kind of refactoring that ought to be happening instead. OpenBSD in particular seems to be developed this way so that it is continually proven robust on as many platforms as possible. I would think the average age of a working computer is *increasing* over time. Old hardware may have relatively higher energy costs than new, but still there is significant energy used in producing or recycling/disposing of it. And software ought to run more efficiently on it over time, as optimisers and our ways of programming become smarter. The above thinking is how I got interested in having an alternative Debian kernel such as kFreeBSD. Regards, -- Steven Chamberlain steven@pyro.eu.org
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