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Linux Kernel Developers Discuss Dropping A Bunch Of Old CPUs

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  • #51
    Originally posted by hotaru View Post
    a 486 might have some value as a museum piece, but for that it'd make a lot more sense to run a period-appropriate operating system, such as MS-DOS.
    I was just thinking about how may 386, 486sx, dx, etc systems I tossed in the dumpster years ago. Junk, stacked floor to ceiling Many working order. I could have rummaged through the stacks and come with CPUs from 8808s till the modern Intel CPU at the time which at the time I think was the Bloomfield.

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    • #52
      Originally posted by Dr. Righteous View Post

      I was just thinking about how may 386, 486sx, dx, etc systems I tossed in the dumpster years ago. Junk, stacked floor to ceiling Many working order. I could have rummaged through the stacks and come with CPUs from 8808s till the modern Intel CPU at the time which at the time I think was the Bloomfield.
      Now days you could have flipped those 386 and 466 boxes for $100-$300 a piece on eBay, depending on specs. Vintage hardware has been soaring in price lately.

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      • #53
        Originally posted by Dr. Righteous View Post

        I was just thinking about how may 386, 486sx, dx, etc systems I tossed in the dumpster years ago. Junk, stacked floor to ceiling Many working order. I could have rummaged through the stacks and come with CPUs from 8808s till the modern Intel CPU at the time which at the time I think was the Bloomfield.
        That's probably true for many of us. As part of my regular job duties I remember junking 50+ early high-end PowerPC macs, lots of 486 stuff, lots of early Pentium 1 stuff... It just wasn't worth saving for 20 years in order to make money on eBay. Long-term storage for items of significant size isn't free.

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        • #54
          Originally posted by thunderbird32 View Post

          Now days you could have flipped those 386 and 466 boxes for $100-$300 a piece on eBay, depending on specs. Vintage hardware has been soaring in price lately.
          That's exactly because so many of us just threw the stuff out, so it's becoming rarer and rarer. Plus, keeping it in running shape gets harder and harder. Capacitors tend to fail over time, especially the big ones in power supplies, and they aren't necessarily inexpensive to replace. And god help you if you have tiny surface-mount components that fail. I've traded or passed along several machines that were worth a significant amount of money in running condition, but that I knew I just wasn't going to have the time and patience to carefully restore. As an example, having a running Silicon Graphics 4D/80GT would be amazing but back in 2003 I didn't have the time or money to restore it. Hopefully its new owner was able to get it back in working shape but I have no idea if that's true or not.

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          • #55
            Originally posted by strtj View Post
            That's probably true for many of us. As part of my regular job duties I remember junking 50+ early high-end PowerPC macs, lots of 486 stuff, lots of early Pentium 1 stuff... It just wasn't worth saving for 20 years in order to make money on eBay. Long-term storage for items of significant size isn't free.
            Yeah, not much of a nostalgia nerd; even though it is interesting an brings back memories just don't have the space to store anything else nor the time.
            I have a couple PCs I decommissioned last year. They work fine and I'm wondering what I'm going to do with now. I'm thinking I'll cram them into the attic as a bonus for whomever I eventually sell my house to .
            Last edited by Dr. Righteous; 11 January 2021, 06:09 PM.

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            • #56
              Originally posted by strtj View Post
              What is the lowest memory device that anyone has running on a 5.x kernel?
              I've run 5.4 on a wireless router with 128MB. OpenWrt can supposedly barely work with only 32MB.

              Originally posted by OpenWrt Wiki
              The current Linux 5.4 barely works with a 32 MB RAM system and spikes in memory consumption can easily crash the router with OOM (Out-of-Memory) errors.

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              • #57
                Originally posted by hotaru View Post

                I've run 5.4 on a wireless router with 128MB. OpenWrt can supposedly barely work with only 32MB.
                That's exactly what I wanted to know. So if you have an architecture where all existing hardware can't support more than ~32-64MB of RAM, there's absolutely no reason not to drop it from the mainline kernel. Unfortunate, but forward progress demands it. Looking at the list of archs in the article, that's actually a surprisingly small percentage of them, but it looks like there are a few where it may apply - 68000, probably SH-2, Sun 3, Apollo, and maybe one or two more. But it is possible to find MIPS R3000 hardware that can take 128MB+ of RAM, and I know there were 486 boards that could take that much too.

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                • #58
                  Originally posted by Dr. Righteous View Post

                  Yeah, not much of a nostalgia nerd; even though it is interesting an brings back memories just don't have the space to store anything else nor the time.
                  I have a couple PCs I decommissioned last year. They work fine and I'm wondering what I'm going to do with now. I'm thinking I'll cram them into the attic as a bonus for whomever I eventually sell my house to .
                  Send them to a recycler?

                  Besides, how old are those computers? Heck, if it's a C2D-era machine it's still good for desktop Linux, even on Wayland. Don't underestimate that processor and its GMA iGPU.

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                  • #59
                    OpenWRT on TP-Link TL-WR1043ND v1

                    Code:
                    [ 0.000000] Linux version 4.14.# (builder@buildhost) (gcc version 7.# (OpenWrt GCC 7.#) #0 Sat May 16 18:32:20 2020
                    [ 0.000000] bootconsole [early0] enabled
                    [ 0.000000] CPU0 revision is: 00019374 (MIPS 24Kc)
                    [ 0.000000] MIPS: machine is TP-Link TL-WR1043ND v1
                    [ 0.000000] SoC: Atheros AR9132 rev 2
                    [ 0.000000] Determined physical RAM map:
                    [ 0.000000] memory: 02000000 @ 00000000 (usable)
                    [ 0.000000] Initrd not found or empty - disabling initrd
                    [ 0.000000] Primary instruction cache 64kB, VIPT, 4-way, linesize 32 bytes.
                    [ 0.000000] Primary data cache 32kB, 4-way, VIPT, cache aliases, linesize 32 bytes
                    Last edited by reba; 12 January 2021, 05:41 AM.

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                    • #60
                      Originally posted by strtj View Post

                      That's exactly what I wanted to know. So if you have an architecture where all existing hardware can't support more than ~32-64MB of RAM, there's absolutely no reason not to drop it from the mainline kernel. Unfortunate, but forward progress demands it. Looking at the list of archs in the article, that's actually a surprisingly small percentage of them, but it looks like there are a few where it may apply - 68000, probably SH-2, Sun 3, Apollo, and maybe one or two more. But it is possible to find MIPS R3000 hardware that can take 128MB+ of RAM, and I know there were 486 boards that could take that much too.
                      Careful now. While the 68000 had only a 24-bit address bus (16 Mbyte directly addressable), later revisions of the 68000 family from the 68020 onwards had 32-bit address buses (4 Gbyte directly addressable), and are still available now:



                      Gives availability of 68020, '030, '040, '060

                      So I wouldn't be so quick to kill the 68000 architecture.

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