CPU support lost in the Linux kernel
For those enjoying tinkering with vintage, retro computer gear: Linux was the kernel and OS supposedly supporting every CPU, smart toaster and coffee machine under the sky.
Unfortunately with all the high massive parallel, performance state of the art tinkering some vintage maintenance burden was recently dropped over the years. Case in point: the original Intel 80386 which lacks the CMPXCHG instruction introduced with the i486, in the Linux kernel 3.8. And also the early Sun SPARC v7, Cypress, which even lacked hardware multiply and divide, somewhere around the kernel release 3.4, … :-/
Update: It also becomes increasingly difficult to configure kernels less than ~2.6MB required for booting on ancient sparc32 Sun machines, … :-(
Update 2: those apparently also required “special” SCSI CD-ROM drives supporting 512 bytes sized sector reads, as opposed to 2048 sized sectors as used by standard PC drives, ..?
