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.
I lost interest in this stuff when I got my first sysadmin job.
Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel
81–90 of 171 posts
Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
486 is pre-RoHS, so there’s probably lead in the solder. I wouldn’t want it hanging around kids.
Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Dad told me he got a new computer. I asked how long he had the old one. Apparently it was my old team fortress computer. So like 15 years.
My parents are still using the first computer I ever built, which is easily 10 years old! Power consumption on that machine is excessive, and I've been meaning to replace it, but the cost per year in excess electricity hasn't made it worth it to upgrade the machine.
Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see that you haven't tried it. Note: read for comprehension. A container may OOM from kernel memory alone.
What process or processes were you running in the container? Edit: nvm, saw you answered it in another thread: `find / > /dev/null`. Interesting!
Yes, find and its parent, the shell, but that's not why it OOMs. It OOMs because Linux uses a lot of memory for inodes and dirents and whatever it puts in slabs and then when memory pressure occurs -- when Linux must allocate in the kernel but cannot, due to limits -- it just loses its mind and instead of reclaiming it kills.
Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel
#85Almost 20 years ago i have internet, but didn't buy router. And found floppyfw: https://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/ Absolutely brilliant distribution that works perfect. And fit on one floppy - kernel and userspace.
See also: tomsrtbt (http://www.toms.net/rb/) and trinux (http://trinux.sourceforge.net/legacy/) , among others.
Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah slightly tangential but I wonder if some of the alternative OSes (looking at you Haiku) could just use Linux as the kernel for portability.
That would be great if people could admit that the kernel isn't the operating system.
Of course the kernel isn't the OS, but it's a big chunk of it, and defines building blocks (and constraints) that the upper layers use.
Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel
#87Posts 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.
There's Alan Cox's Fuzix which runs on 68000, Z80, and 8080 CPUs, among others.
Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel
#88The 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.
The Pi is also notoriously Broadcom-proprietary[1], whereas an x86 PC has been a de-facto standard for decades; everything is well-known or has been reverse-engineered already, especially with a 486-era system. It's somewhat similar to the reason people (like me) restore and drive old cars, also despite the "noise and power consumption" (and some happen to like the former ;-) --- they're relatively simple and well-un…
Hmm. This https://s-matyukevich.github.io/raspberry-pi-os/ made it seem like it's about as open as an x86 PC. The only thing I see that's proprietary is the very initial bootloader that apparently runs on the GPU. But then x86 motherboards come with proprietary BIOSes as well.
Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Pi is also notoriously Broadcom-proprietary[1], whereas an x86 PC has been a de-facto standard for decades; everything is well-known or has been reverse-engineered already, especially with a 486-era system. It's somewhat similar to the reason people (like me) restore and drive old cars, also despite the "noise and power consumption" (and some happen to like the former ;-) --- they're relatively simple and well-un…
Broadcom is horrible with datasheets. If you're not apple or intel, an f off should be expected in any request for a datasheet from them.
At work, we briefly considered deploying a fleet of raspberry pis as cheep ARM servers. We ordered an initial batch for evaluation, but then quickly realized just how little technical information Broadcom and the Raspberry Pi Foundation are willing to make available to their users. They were tight-lipped even with the bare minimums. We ended up abandoning the idea soon after.
Unless these companies manage to break away from their bad habits, I can't see ARM servers gaining any sort of market share outside of big companies.
Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel
#90[deleted]