A while back there was some debate about the Linux kernel dropping support for some very old GPUs. (I can’t remember the exact models, but they were roughly from the late 90’s)
It spurred a lot of discussion on how many years of hardware support is reasonable to expect.
I would like to hear y’alls views on this. What do you think is reasonable?
The fact that some people were mad that their 25 year old GPU wouldn’t be officially supported by the latest Linux kernel seemed pretty silly to me. At that point, the machine is a vintage piece of tech history. Valuable in its own right, and very cool to keep alive, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable for the devs to drop it after two and a half decades.
I think for me, a 10 year minimum seems reasonable.
And obviously, much of this work is for little to no pay, so love and gratitude to all the devs that help keep this incredible community and ecosystem alive!
And don’t forget to Pay for your free software!!!
There’s a good argument for more modular kernels (microkernels and such). That way the driver could be kept going for decades, only updating the IPC protocol as the microkernel changes through time
Isn’t the linux kernel modular already? It does has modules… which drivers can be, although they tend to be in-kernel.