Ah, I have had fond memories of my time with the 80386 processor from Intel which first debuted in 1985. That would make it more than a quarter of a century old, now how about that? Since 1985, the venerable i386 processor has served numerous PC users worldwide, providing an unprecedented boost in speed and power, that playing Bitmaps Brothers’ Gods on it proved to be one lightning quick affair. Well, unfortunately the world works this way – anything that is old enough would not last, and developers of the Linux 3.8 kernel made the decision to drop Intel 386 support.
Developer Ingo Molnar said upon submission of the change a couple of days ago, “This tree removes ancient-386-CPUs support and thus zaps quite a bit of complexity. That complexity has meant extra work for kernel developers for years.” Let us pause for a minute of silence here for a dearly departed friend, and those who have very old hardware will find that in due time, they too, will be unable to run modern versions of Linux.