Back in 2012 when Linus Torvalds officially ended kernel support for legacy 386 processors, he famously closed the commit message with “Good riddance.” Maintaining support for such old hardware had been complicating things behind the scenes for years while offering very little practical benefit, so removing all that legacy code was like taking a weight off the developer’s shoulders. Of course, some decisions are easier to make than others. When maintaining antiquated code monopolizes developer time, or even directly conflicts with new code, a difficult decision needs to be made. With developer’s eyes always on the horizon ahead of them, it should come as no surprise to find that support for older hardware or protocols occasionally falls to the wayside. There’s always another feature to implement, an optimization to make, and of course, another device to support. The story of Linux so far, as short as it may be in the grand scheme of things, is one of constant forward momentum.

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