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also, this video features a 486 cpu because linux dropped 386 support a while ago. https://www.zdnet.com/article/good-bye-386-linux-to-drop-sup...
Anyone know what in particular the 486SX had that the 386 didn’t to make keeping only the former alive practical? Unfortunately the kernel mailing list link in the zdnet article appears to be rotted away.
Posts like this showcase how malleable Linux really is without getting overly complicated to follow. Really a nice quick read.
But not nearly as malleable as it could be. Hopefully, true 80386 support can be reintroduced to the kernel in a way that keeps it properly self-contained and easy to support. There are also a few kernel-tinification approaches floating around that could make the kernel smaller and easy to fit in a floppy-using scenario.
The merge which removed the 80386 support (https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/c/743aa456c1834f76982af44e8b...) stated as the reason "[...] complexity has plagued us with extra work whenever we wanted to change SMP primitives, for years."
That is, it was not easy to keep it self-contained. Every new SMP primitive has to be implemented and maintained for all the architectures supported by the kernel, and the original 80386 ISA was too limited. Not to mention that the 80386 didn't honor the write-protect bit in the page tables while in the kernel (https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/c/a5c2a893dbd4956a72fb261e87...), with consequences all over the kernel (https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/c/96d4f267e40f9509e8a66e2b39...).
Does anyone else miss having this level of motivation? And that's not an isolation effect on me, I gave up on trying fun things like this for a long long time now.
The virtue of reusing an old system is somewhat eroded by the fact that its noise and power consumption exceed that of a more powerful Pi 3 B+, which can be had for $50-60 with case and power supply (circa 2020). I see little advantage in keeping the old hardware around anymore. I think I still have some old ISA cables downstairs in a box - high time to acknowledge to myself that I will NEVER use those again.
AFAIK You can't hook up old ISA or PCI cards to a raspberry pi, and if you can, the x86 drivers and software won't work.
An ISA/IDE cable is just copper ribbon cable using .1" spacing, which is what the GPIO header pin spacing is on a Pi. There is a pin blocked on the standard ide female connector but that pin is just one of many ground connectors on the Pi. Clip it off or dremel/drill out the hole as needed. Jeez, now I just convinced myself that I MIGHT use the cable some day. Thanks a lot! >:/ Was trying to throw it away.
There's a PCI bridge for the raspberry pi 4, if for whatever reason one would want to do such a thing. Drivers might be a problem if the card's linux support sucks but that's kind of a separate issue. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-4-pci-express...
EDIT: Oh, maybe your point was that the reason to keep the 486 around is to use old ISA/PCI cards - sorry, I mentioned ISA cables in OC so thought you were replying to that. Yeah, point taken, but I'm skeptical that there are any but the most narrow cases where the function of an old ISA/PCI card can't be replicated/emulated with better performance on a Pi. I mean, trying to think of the edge cases - an old SCSI RAID controller? Maybe some proprietary industrial controller stuff? but yeah. My comment about junking the old stuff was just a criticism of the inclination I think all of us nerds have to get that old box back into production use at home. I think there are very few - if any - cases where that makes sense anymore.
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I guess it depends on if noise and power are your primary considerations. For some, they'd rather not see a useful machine take up space in a landfill, leech toxins into the environment, and simultaneously drive unneeded demand for the production of yet another computer. I guess one would have to do the math and figure out what the environmental impact of a new Pi 3 B+ is. Or they could figure out if the increased el…
I fully empathize with this - I hate throwing out/recycling electronics. The power side it truly does depend on your local rates of course. If you consider a 24/7 draw of about 35 watts to power an out-of-box 486 DX2 (headless) vs like 3 watts for an RPI, you can do the math with some variance and figure out just how long the $60 will last you. But a 10-fold reduction in power consumption is pretty remarkable. When y…
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> the container will OOM right away that doesn't really makes sense in linux-parlance. you should try and see which is the process that is actually triggering the OOM. if you're able to do that then you can try and swap that with another binary. you could try and build an hello world that does while(1) sleep(30); build that with static linking and boot the container with that -- it will probably work. also, i should…
I see that you haven't tried it. Note: read for comprehension. A container may OOM from kernel memory alone.
Edit: nvm, saw you answered it in another thread: `find / > /dev/null`. Interesting!
The virtue of reusing an old system is somewhat eroded by the fact that its noise and power consumption exceed that of a more powerful Pi 3 B+, which can be had for $50-60 with case and power supply (circa 2020). I see little advantage in keeping the old hardware around anymore. I think I still have some old ISA cables downstairs in a box - high time to acknowledge to myself that I will NEVER use those again.
Does anyone else miss having this level of motivation? And that's not an isolation effect on me, I gave up on trying fun things like this for a long long time now.