Linux on an 8-bit micro? (2012)

Post by teddyh » Tue, Sep 20, 2016, 1:42 PM UTC

VLM wrote: post #36

teddyh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rhetorical question: If writing the emulator was the “crux”, then why doesn’t the headline mention it? Why isn’t the whole article about it? I would certainly have upvoted and whole-heartedly lauded a story entitled “An 32-bit ARM emulator for an 8-bit CPU”. Instead, they used the headline and article content to heavily imply to actually have ported Linux to an 8-bit processor. It’s not until into about half the arti…

There is some wonderousness that they completed the emulation enough to run something complicated like linux. Its very easy to use something limited, say a HP48 in RPN mode and some arrays as "memory" and variables as registers to implement a couple opcodes of say a 68hc11. I did that around '93 or so when the 'hc11 was contemporary (its ancient history now, but it was kind of a 6809-like microcontroller with pretty…

Post by joosters » Tue, Sep 20, 2016, 1:59 PM UTC

teddyh wrote: post #9

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…

Post by nullc » Tue, Sep 20, 2016, 3:41 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #16

nullc wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Linux isn't 'running' on your x86_64 cpu because cpu is microcoded... or transmeta? Or... Linux is written in C.. so it's not running on your computer because it doesn't execute C directly? Come on. There is a 8-bit microcontroller running a linux system, the rest is implementation details and semantics.

I think the argument is that one would expect "Linux running on architecture Foo" to imply support in Linux for Foo, rather than support in Foo for Linux that allows Linux to run unmodified. I certainly expected, when I clicked, to read about someone's effort to rewrite a minimal subset of the Linux kernel to use exclusively 8-bit registers and no MMU.

Post by dmitrygr » Tue, Sep 20, 2016, 4:00 PM UTC

patmcguire wrote: post #46

Chrome gives some ssl-shaming for this site that I haven't seen before. An angry red warning and text that says "This site uses a weak security configuration (SHA-1 signatures), so your connection may not be private."

Post by itgoon » Tue, Sep 20, 2016, 5:20 PM UTC

koytch wrote: post #10

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.