The Linux kernel retired support for the AMD K5 this week — a chip that failed commercially in 1996 and hasn't existed in production since the Clinton administration. The panel sits with the question of what 'we still support this' was actually doing for thirty years, and who it was doing it for.

This episode takes the Linux kernel's removal of non-TSC code paths — and with them, support for the AMD K5 and several Cyrix parts — as an entry point into something much larger: the way long-lived systems accumulate maintenance debt that nobody is tracking, on behalf of users who stopped existing decades ago.

The Legacy Sysadmin opens with firsthand context. He bought K5s in 1997 because they were cheap, regretted all of them, and replaced them with K6s by 1998. The chip wasn't beloved. It was a commercial failure AMD shipped becau ...