Apparently Intel has had a Radiation Hardened Pentium for 14 years:

http://www.sandia.gov/media/rhp.htm

Those satellites that are going up with the old radiation hardened 386 are going to have to run a version of the linux kernel 3.7 or earlier. I suspect they are conservative with regards to their kernel choice anyways, so that should be okay.

I'm into retrocomputing so these kinds of retirements always sting a bit.

In realistic long term operations, deprecations don't hurt. I.e. your air traffic control system running on PA-RISC and HP-UX doesn't care that HP-UX only run on Itanium now. You keep running the old software and set up some kind of support schedule to keep the system patched during it's service life through the vendor or otherwise.

It's comforting to know others are interested in "retrocomputing". For some reason I like slow old computers too. (Not being sarcastic here at all)

It's preserving our history. We can learn a lot from what we already did.

Besides, when the machines take over, they may want to spare those who respected them ;-)

I hope they feed me and keep my cage clean.

I've got a soft spot for the Z80 and they were considered out of date by the time I was born. A few years ago I found a great book on how to build a simple microcomputer based on the Z80. I learned a ton working through that book and that little chip brought me a lot of joy. I've still got a couple Z80s in my part drawer... you know... just in case...

Z80 was only out of date when you were born if you're not TI.

Same. Sometimes they are faster and more productive, despite being older.

It makes me sad from a retrocomputing standpoint as well. I have a sun386i in storage that I always said I would port linux to one day. Oh well...

I can't blame them for wanting to drop it though, not only do you not have the full range of atomic operations, but also the MMU doesn't respect the WP bit from kernelspace which means special code in copy_to_user()

I wonder how long they will keep the 486SX alive now that it's the last one that requires 387 emulation.

> I would port linux to one day. Oh well...

You've still got all the old kernels that do support it. And Debian certainly has historical archives (http://www.debian.org/distrib/archive) and I'm sure other distros do too, if you want all the other linux architecture.

Linux is very slow with removing old drivers and CPUs compared to the commercial operating systems, which is nice because it allows it to run almost everywhere on the cheapest hardware. But they cannot keep everything forever (maintainability nightmare). They also removed token ring network support just this year.

Applications that use those sorts of chips probably also use really old versions of the kernel (if they use the Linux kernel at all), versions that they validated for their use case many years ago and then never updated.

A rad hardened machine won't be running 3.7, or 3.6.x for that matter. They will be running something a bit older with (guess I don't know for sure) security patches being back ported as needed.

I'd think that most of them would be using a RTOS like VxWorks or QNX.

Linux is used in a lot of places these days, where VxWorks or QNX might've been. I've been responsible for putting Linux to work in SIL-4 critical systems all over Europe, for example, saving millions in licensing costs while at the same time, getting Linux certified for safety-critical apps. It really is taking over.

Whats the current state of the real-time patches for linux? Last I'd talk to someone about them, this was a while ago, they felt a bit sub-par. From a developer's point of view is it as easy to work with and predictable as VxWorks?

Sure, its easy to work with. Just don't always try to work with the latest, bleeding edge kernels. Most RT/Safety-Critical Linux kernel installs are still based on 2.6.x, or even some cases, 2.4.x series ..