The Linux Kernel Looks To Drop Much Of The Remaining SPARC 32-bit CPU Support

It's just not old wired and wireless networking drivers being removed from the mainline Linux kernel but as part of some winter-time cleaning a set of patches have been posted that would remove much of the remaining SPARC32 support for old 32-bit Sun workstations.

With Frontgrade Gaisler's LEON3 processors there still are 32-bit SPARC hardware out there being used, so the mainline Linux kernel stops short of dropping the SPARC32 architecture entirely. These proposed kernel patches drop the SUn-4M and Sun-4D targets while just leaving remaining SPARC32 elements used by the LEON processor designs.

The Sun3D "Dragon" was great for its day in the early 90's with the SPARCserver 1000 and SPARCcenter 2000 but is obviously long obsolete. The Sun4M as a multi-processor Sun-4 variant is also a museum relic from the SunOS 4.1+ and Solaris 2 days.

The patches removing this old SPARC32 code from the kernel lighten up the codebase by about 10.5k lines. It's been build-time tested but for lack of access to any relevant SPARC32 hardware hasn't been run-time tested or put through paces with QEMU emulation.

In any case it looks like this clean-up will likely go through in 2024 for further eliminating outdated hardware support.