Interesting article on the "costs of supporting legacy hardware"

[Christopher Browne]

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2012/02/the-costs-of-supporting-legacy-hardware/

I think that the thesis presented explains a lot about why mobile
platform projects have a hard time staying viable.  You likely can't
buy a cell phone from 6 years ago, and it would likely have *so*
vastly less capacity than new hardware that few will be terribly
interested in working on having modern software accommodate the
elderly hardware.

We're pretty lucky that a six year old desktop can run reasonably
nicely as a headless server, otherwise Linux on desktop and server
would be suffering pretty badly from the troubles described.

And it seems to me that the "costs of supporting legacy hardware" has
a fair bit of explanatory power for how difficult it is to support
anything other than the very most popular OS.

Linux (the kernel) has so many developers surrounding it that the
community can support a pretty broad set of hardware.

The BSDs have fewer developers, but still have enough that they can
keep up by "cherry picking" from what Linux gets supported.  That's
not to say they're not doing real work; there are some interesting
things going on particularly in the filesystems area.

I'm not quite sure how Plan 9 persisted to not be an inoperable
curiosity; it suffered from the "only supports hardware that's only
barely available" for quite a while.  The hardware compatibility list
(<http://www.plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Supported_PC_hardware/index.html>)
is fairly large; the last time I attempted an install I ran afoul of
the "oops, it doesn't support my SCSI controller" problem.
Entertainingly, the list of supported SCSI controllers hasn't changed
much since then.  And the progression of video hardware support and
lack of support looks likely to fit with the initial blog entry.

GNU Hurd has been malingering at the edges; it probably deserves a
talk.  Unfortunately, there are so few people working on GNU Mach (the
kernel) that the easiest way to keep Hurd running these days is by
running it atop a VM such as QEMU.  Sadly, IA-32 only.  So, in effect,
it only runs on >6yr old hardware, or on newer stuff running another
OS and then emulating >6yr old hardware :-(.
-- 
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question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
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