
Linux Set to Shed Nearly 500k Lines of Code by Dropping Old CPUs - rayascott
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-4.17-Gutting-Old-CPUs
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jwilk
See also: [https://lwn.net/Articles/748074/](https://lwn.net/Articles/748074/)

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jlgaddis
Thanks. The link should be updated to point to this LWN article, IMO.

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caf
The linked pull request (
[http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1804.0/00306.html](http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1804.0/00306.html)
) is informative, in particular:

 _In the end, it seems that while the eight architectures are extremely
different, they all suffered the same fate: There was one company in charge of
an SoC line, a CPU microarchitecture and a software ecosystem, which was more
costly than licensing newer off-the-shelf CPU cores from a third party
(typically ARM, MIPS, or RISC-V). It seems that all the SoC product lines are
still around, but have not used the custom CPU architectures for several years
at this point. In contrast, CPU instruction sets that remain popular and have
actively maintained kernel ports tend to all be used across multiple
licensees._

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ganeshkrishnan
Good. It's not as if they can't use Linux anymore. They can still use the
older version of kernels.

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pc2g4d
Using older kernels opens you to security vulnerabilities. I think this was
mainly justified because nobody was using the current kernel on those
architectures anyway.

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nwah1
Some older kernels still have support via LTS

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juliangoldsmith
I'm surprised that M68K isn't included in the list. I doubt there are many
M68K machines that could run a current Linux kernel.

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jwilk
The number of users doesn't matter that much as long as the port is actively
maintained.

Judging by the activity on the M68K mailing list, the port is alive and
kicking:

[https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-m68k/](https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-m68k/)

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PHGamer
so onto NetBSD then?

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jwilk
Does NetBSD support any of the CPUs in question? I don't see them here:
[https://www.netbsd.org/ports/](https://www.netbsd.org/ports/)

