On Wed, Jul 01, 2020 at 02:36:23PM -0400, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 01, 2020 at 08:18:37PM +0200, Martin Steigerwald wrote:
> > Unless it is not just the kernel but also glibc or something somehow not
> > working on older hardware.
>
> It may well be that the newer hardware has machine instructions not
> available on older hardware, and that the compilers that generate
> packaged code use those machine instructions; in which case the new
> packages would be quite incomatible with the old hardware.

glibc, and probably many individual programs as well; gcc defaults have been
changed to produce i686 instructions so you'd need to rebuild world to get
i586 or i486 back.

The question remains, why? For driving that medical scanner/CNC machine
you're much better off running software from that era instead of risking
regressions. For any other use, you're in Amiga/etc land, and it's a matter
of hobby rather than productively "using old 'still good' hardware".

Meow!
-- 
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⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ in the beginning was the boot and root floppies and they were good.
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀                                       -- <willmore> on #linux-sunxi
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