alt Hacker NewsI can’t help but wonder if kernel devs realize how much this discussion sounds like something you’d expect from Apple. They are talking about obsoleting hardware not because it’s fundamentally broken, but because it no longer fits neatly into a roadmap. Open source has always been about making hardware outlive commercial interest and let it run long after the hardware vendor abandons it.
I'm pretty shocked to see comments like "the RAM for a 32-bit system costs more than the CPU itself", but open source isn’t supposed to be about market pricing or what’s convenient for vendors; it’s about giving users the freedom to decide what’s worth running.
I understand that maintainers don’t want to drag around unmaintained code forever, and that testing on rare hardware is difficult. But if the code already exists and is working, is it really that costly to just not break it? The kernel's history is full of examples where obscure architectures and configs were kept alive for decades with minimal intervention. Removing them feels like a philosophical shift, especially when modern hardware is more locked down and has a variety of black box systems running behind it like Intel ME and AMD PSP.
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What's the Venn diagram of people stuck with 32-bit hardware and people needing features of newer kernels? Existing kernels will keep working. New devices probably wouldn't support that ancient hardware; seen any new AGP graphics cards lately?
There's not a compelling reason to run a bleeding edge kernel on a 2004 computer, and definitely not one worth justifying making the kernel devs support that setup.
> They are talking about obsoleting hardware not because it’s fundamentally broken, but because it no longer fits neatly into a roadmap.
Not really. The discussion is about cost, benefits and available resources. Projects are not immune because they are open source or free software. Actual people still need to do the work.
> Open source has always been about making hardware outlive commercial interest and let it run long after the hardware vendor abandons it.
Again, not really. Open source has always been all about freely modifying and distributing software. This leaves some freedom for anyone to keep supporting their pet hardware, but that’s a consequence. In this case, I don’t think it would be a real problem if anyone would step up and commit the ressources necessary to keep supporting older hardware. This freedom was not taken away because a project’s developers decided that something was not worth their time anymore.
> open source isn’t supposed to be about market pricing or what’s convenient for vendors; it’s about giving users the freedom to decide what’s worth running.
Ehhh, it's about users having the ability to run whatever they like. Which they do.
If a group of users of 32 bit hardware care to volunteer to support the latest kernel features, then there's no problem.
If no one does, then why should a volunteer care enough to do it for them? It's not like the old kernel versions will stop working. Forcing volunteers to work on something they don't want to do is just a bad way to manage volunteers.
> But if the code already exists and is working, is it really that costly to just not break it?
It depends on the feature, but in many cases the answer is in fact 'yes.' There's a reason why Alpha support (defunct for decades) still goes on but Itanium support (defunct for years) has thoroughly been ripped out of systems.