Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

insentricity.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 171 posts

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#121

Post by tverbeure »

locao wrote: post #37

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 picked it up again!

2 years ago, I was fed and bored with spending my evenings and weekends doing nothing useful, so I built myself an electronics lab and now I’m in there almost every night.

The last few weekends I’ve been trying to reverse engineer and hack the firmware of a 25 year old Tektronix oscilloscope.

It’s a bit of a pointless exercise, and somebody asked me on Twitter “why?”, and the simple reply is “because it’s there.”

But also: I’ve learned to use Ghidra and it’s given me tons of hours of tinkering.

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#122

Post by kristopolous »

locao wrote: post #37

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.

Dealing with garbage tech is what brings me down. Completely broken, unusable garbage software is everywhere, backed by egos, emotions, power plays, and entrenchment. That's the part I don't want to deal with. The only thing worse than having to deal with a bunch of idiots is having to deal with a bunch of things made by them. It pisses me off how broken everything is and how few people seem to take issue with it.

Everything is like this. Sturgeon's law is everywhere.

Once I can somehow push those things out of my life, I'm good.

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#123

Post by boothby »

person_of_color wrote: post #109
locao wrote: post #37

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.

There’s no ROI on doing this stuff besides the intangibles. This is a startup news website, and you’re on here because you want, or were interested in, getting rich during the ages of 18-35. Could just be me though.

It's not just you, but personally, I've never been interested in getting rich. For me, HN is a replacement for slashdot, after every second comment there was racial slur copypasta. I'm here for the technical articles and wacky projects like this.

For myself, opportunities to hack on fun side-projects are rare but I cherish them. Geeking out brings me satisfaction and joy. I've put a couple of fun projects on github and every fork & star is a little hit of shameless gratification: unlike karma on these blasted social sites, it feels like I've done something tangible to bring a smile to somebody's face. Because I did! That's not an intangible, it's good for my mental health!

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#124

Post by anticensor »

aksss wrote: post #45
reaperducer wrote: post #29

Earlier 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…

Alternative use for a 486 case - reused as a computer case for a cluster of fresh single-board computers.

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#125

Post by fierarul »

cesarb wrote: post #42
pgtan wrote: post #19

Modern days Linux kernel requires a bootloader, as seen in the video. In the old days, you could dd the kernel to the floppy disk and use rdev to point to the root partition to start after loading the kernel.

A couple of days ago, I went looking for when this code was removed. It was removed in 2003: https://lwn.net/Articles/21512/

Nice link!

The code is so tiny they could have kept it... But, oh well, progress.

I like the message:

  -  .ascii "Loading"
  +bugger_off_msg:
  + .ascii "Direct booting from floppy is no longer supported.\r\n"
  + .ascii "Please use a boot loader program instead.\r\n"
  + .ascii "\n"
  + .ascii "Remove disk and press any key to reboot . . .\r\n"
  + .byte 0

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#126

Post by happycube »

aksss wrote: post #20

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.

Another good cheap option if the Pi doesn't suit you is an up-cycled thin client - some HP T620 configs (quad AMD Jaguar, 4GB RAM, 16GB flash) are (There's also the T620 Pro, but those are going for a bit more these days since they make good home routers when you add a quad gig-e card...)

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#127

Post by zozbot234 »

cesarb wrote: post #62
zozbot234 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Hopefully, true 80386 support can be reintroduced to the kernel in a way that keeps it properly self-contained and easy to support. 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-containe…

Were 80386 SMP systems really all that common to begin with? Perhaps 80386 support should just focus on the uniprocessor case, at least as a start.

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#128

Post by coolreader18 »

happycube wrote: post #126
aksss wrote: post #20

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.

Another good cheap option if the Pi doesn't suit you is an up-cycled thin client - some HP T620 configs (quad AMD Jaguar, 4GB RAM, 16GB flash) are (There's also the T620 Pro, but those are going for a bit more these days since they make good home routers when you add a quad gig-e card...)

You can also always just find an old desktop box and install a lightweight distro on it -- my grandpa got a new computer a year or so ago so I took his ~10 year old HP box, wiped it, and installed alpine. Now I have it just plugged into my router and I have a few cron jobs and docker services that I run on it.

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#129

Post by radomir_cernoch »

locao wrote: post #37

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've struggled with keeping this kind of motivation for years. My way out involved getting an interesting job and finding a topic, which is somehow related to the work (so that your reason doesn't fight) yet not directly aimed at a practical outcome in your work (to keep the enjoyment).

For me, personally, the hobby part became SAT solving. It's related to software verification and theorem proving and I feel like learning something useful - even for my family through better career prospects (responsibility box ticked). And I still get the bit-fiddling just as when hacking old microprocessors.

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#130

Post by radomir_cernoch »

justapassenger wrote: post #117
locao wrote: post #37

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.

For most people I know (including me) tinkering like that dies down when you get an IT job. After spending 40h+ per week dealing with stupid computers, you rarely have enough motivation to do it again at home, as a hobby. You just want stuff to work. But the tinkering urge isn't gone. I highly recommend finding different hobby, that can satisfy that itch. Gardening, woodworking, cars, motorcycles, 3d printing, etc. Y…

I second that. Woodworking is great for hackers.
Post reply on HN