Linux 7.2 has landed, dragging x86 timing clean out of the nineties by making the Time Stamp Counter mandatory.
I wrote up a quick article on why ditching those ancient legacy fallbacks is good housekeeping, plus a few other bits like cache-aware scheduling and memory tweaks worth noting.
Is anyone still using legacy hardware? If so, what do you use it for?
There are LTS versions outside of current.
But more importantly, who runs anything remotely critical on a 486 these days? These machines choke to death on TLS handshakes.
Who said anything about critical?
I just don’t want my hard disk wiped when I decide to try a piece of software.
You aren’t running any relatively recent software on a 486, period. Even if you did and it turned out to be a virus, the chances of it hitting a bug in the kernel are extremely low.
This is just grasping at straws.
Industrial machine controllers frequently run on ancient hardware
And they are very notoriously outdated in terms of software.
Do they run the latest Linux kernel?