Linux on an 8-bit micro? (2012)

#1

Post by bootload » Tue, Sep 20, 2016, 6:51 AM UTC

Linux on an 8-bit micro? (2012)
dmitry.gr

Re: Linux on an 8-bit micro? (2012)

#2

Post by paulannesley » Tue, Sep 20, 2016, 6:59 AM UTC

Very cool (TL;DR: it's an ARM emulator for 8-bit AVR which can slowly boot Linux). Could do with a [2012] tag in the title.

Re: Linux on an 8-bit micro? (2012)

#3

Post by bootload » Tue, Sep 20, 2016, 6:59 AM UTC

"It is common to see newbies asking in microcontroller forums if they can run Linux on their puny little 8-bit micro. The results are usually laughter..."

The reason why...

"uARM is certainly no speed demon. It takes about 2 hours to boot to bash prompt ("init=/bin/bash" kernel command line). Then 4 more hours to boot up the entire Ubuntu ("exec init" and then login)."

It is so slow. Btw if you ever ask about system compiles of Elm on RaspberryPi which requires Haskell, you'll get similar responses.

Re: Linux on an 8-bit micro? (2012)

#4

Post by bootload » Tue, Sep 20, 2016, 7:00 AM UTC

paulannesley wrote: post #2

Very cool (TL;DR: it's an ARM emulator for 8-bit AVR which can slowly boot Linux). Could do with a [2012] tag in the title.

done.

Re: Linux on an 8-bit micro? (2012)

#5

Post by dnautics » Tue, Sep 20, 2016, 7:08 AM UTC

I wonder if you could write parallelization routines that make this slightly faster with a few more atmels...

Re: Linux on an 8-bit micro? (2012)

#6

Post by ajdlinux » Tue, Sep 20, 2016, 7:29 AM UTC

bootload wrote: post #3

"It is common to see newbies asking in microcontroller forums if they can run Linux on their puny little 8-bit micro. The results are usually laughter..." The reason why... "uARM is certainly no speed demon. It takes about 2 hours to boot to bash prompt ("init=/bin/bash" kernel command line). Then 4 more hours to boot up the entire Ubuntu ("exec init" and then login)." It is so slow. Btw if you ever ask about system…

Well, it's not so much that as the fact that Linux requires a 32-bit architecture (and preferably an MMU).

Re: Linux on an 8-bit micro? (2012)

#7

Post by oldmanjay » Tue, Sep 20, 2016, 7:29 AM UTC

Something about this just gives me joy. It's so ridiculous that it's beautiful.

Re: Linux on an 8-bit micro? (2012)

#8

Post by pjmlp » Tue, Sep 20, 2016, 7:35 AM UTC

bootload wrote: post #3

"It is common to see newbies asking in microcontroller forums if they can run Linux on their puny little 8-bit micro. The results are usually laughter..." The reason why... "uARM is certainly no speed demon. It takes about 2 hours to boot to bash prompt ("init=/bin/bash" kernel command line). Then 4 more hours to boot up the entire Ubuntu ("exec init" and then login)." It is so slow. Btw if you ever ask about system…

One is better using a programming language with a rich runtime when targeting such processors, but newbies aren't going to search for programming languages with bare metal toolchains.

Re: Linux on an 8-bit micro? (2012)

#9

Post by teddyh » Tue, Sep 20, 2016, 7:44 AM UTC

More like Linux on 32-bit ARM, but running in an emulator on an 8-bit processor. I don't think this qualifies as “Running” Linux on an 8-bit processor.

I voiced the same complaint when somebody claimed to “run” Windows 3 on an Apple watch (IIRC), which also was achieved by running a standard PC-hardware emulator, and running Windows 3 on that.

These are somewhat interesting accomplishments, but the click-bait factor is high.

Re: Linux on an 8-bit micro? (2012)

#10

Post by koytch » Tue, Sep 20, 2016, 7:49 AM UTC

dnautics wrote: post #5

I wonder if you could write parallelization routines that make this slightly faster with a few more atmels...

Multiprocessor AVR running Linux would be the next step, definitely.