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New Linux port for the Nintendo 64

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Re: New Linux port for the Nintendo 64

#181

Post by tutfbhuf »

laumars wrote: post #176
pjmlp wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just need to get the information the same way I did, https://developer.nintendo.com/ Other than that I can only point out the CCC related Also given the amount of hypervisor and container baggage that gets placed on top of Linux to make for the lack of microkernel like safety, it doesn't really matter if it happens to win a couple of micro-benchmarks.

Nintendo don’t publish detailed schematics of their systems to the level that you’re claiming. Not even on their developers portal. (I’ve had developer account with Nintendo since the Wii days). And with regards to your point about Linux vs micro kernels, it does make a massive difference when you’re talking about hardware like the N64 which wouldn’t want any of those features which micro kernels excel at and which e…

laumars, I think what I'm missing to hear from you is why microkernels are such a bad and horrible idea and more importantly why Nintendo itself is mistaken if they had used them on their devices. Otherwise, I still think they are a good fit.

Re: New Linux port for the Nintendo 64

#182

Post by laumars »

tutfbhuf wrote: post #179
laumars wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if unconfirmed, I think that Nintendo might use Microkernels according to reverse engeneering finds That was literally what I said :) > shows their massive potential for constrained devices. Although certainly not for performance reasons Games consoles are about as far removed from a constrained device as you could possibly get.

> Games consoles are about as far removed from a constrained device as you could possibly get. It seems to me that you are always ignore low-end devices and very old devices. If we are talking about an PS5 then yes, this and similar devices are not very constrained, even a full blown Kubuntu might run on some. But, again there are low-end gaming devices with a tiny black and white screen for 10 dollars and old gaming…

N64 wouldn’t have been considered “constrained” when it was new though. To be honest it’s not really constrained even now, not compared to the sort of hardware you were discussing earlier. And it’s rather disingenuous how you keep rocking back and forth between current generation consoles and 20+ year old tech as if it’s all current hardware. It makes it rather hard to reply to your points when you then when the goal posts constantly get shifted.

PS5 would easily run Linux considering the PS3 had a few Linux distros ported to it (back when Sony endorsed running Linux on their hardware via the “Other OS” option, which they later removed). Linux is pretty lightweight by modern hardware standards anyways. It’s just not suitable for every domain (but what OS is?)

On then topic of consoles running Linux, pretty sure I have a CD-R somewhere with Linux for the Dreamcast. That was the era when consoles really started to converge on a modern-looking software development approach.

Re: New Linux port for the Nintendo 64

#183

Post by laumars »

tutfbhuf wrote: post #181
laumars wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nintendo don’t publish detailed schematics of their systems to the level that you’re claiming. Not even on their developers portal. (I’ve had developer account with Nintendo since the Wii days). And with regards to your point about Linux vs micro kernels, it does make a massive difference when you’re talking about hardware like the N64 which wouldn’t want any of those features which micro kernels excel at and which e…

laumars, I think what I'm missing to hear from you is why microkernels are such a bad and horrible idea and more importantly why Nintendo itself is mistaken if they had used them on their devices. Otherwise, I still think they are a good fit.

They’re not a bad and horrible idea. I never once said that. Micro kernels are, in my opinion, the future of OS development because they offer a bunch of guarantees which are much harder to achieve with a monolithic kernel (like memory safety, stability (eg a segfault in a driver doesn’t bring down the entire kernel) and so on and so forth.

The problem worth micro kernels is that abstraction isn’t free. That’s less of an issue with modern hardware running modern work loads because you’d need to put that memory safety in regardless of the kernel architecture and chips these days are fast enough that the benefits of security and safety far far outweigh the deminishing cost in performance. However on the N64 you don’t need any of the benefits that a micro kernel offers while you do need to preserve as many clock cycles as you can. So a micro kernel isn’t well suited for that specific domain. The case would be different again for any modern low footprint hardware because they’d still be running on CPUs clocked at an order of magnitude more and modern embedded system might need to take security or stability concerns more seriously than an air gapped 90s game console.

In short, micro kernels are the future but the N64, being a retro system, needs an approach from the past.

This is why it doesn’t help how modern and 90s hardware have been conflated as equivalent throughout this discussion.

Re: New Linux port for the Nintendo 64

#184

Post by tutfbhuf »

laumars wrote: post #183
tutfbhuf wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

laumars, I think what I'm missing to hear from you is why microkernels are such a bad and horrible idea and more importantly why Nintendo itself is mistaken if they had used them on their devices. Otherwise, I still think they are a good fit.

They’re not a bad and horrible idea. I never once said that. Micro kernels are, in my opinion, the future of OS development because they offer a bunch of guarantees which are much harder to achieve with a monolithic kernel (like memory safety, stability (eg a segfault in a driver doesn’t bring down the entire kernel) and so on and so forth. The problem worth micro kernels is that abstraction isn’t free. That’s less o…

> However on the N64 you don’t need any of the benefits that a micro kernel offers while you do need to preserve as many clock cycles as you can. So a micro kernel isn’t well suited for that specific domain

How come that Nintendo decided to use them (according to reverse engeneering finds)? If they are not suited, then Nintendo should know that right?

Re: New Linux port for the Nintendo 64

#185

Post by tutfbhuf »

laumars wrote: post #182
tutfbhuf wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Games consoles are about as far removed from a constrained device as you could possibly get. It seems to me that you are always ignore low-end devices and very old devices. If we are talking about an PS5 then yes, this and similar devices are not very constrained, even a full blown Kubuntu might run on some. But, again there are low-end gaming devices with a tiny black and white screen for 10 dollars and old gaming…

N64 wouldn’t have been considered “constrained” when it was new though. To be honest it’s not really constrained even now, not compared to the sort of hardware you were discussing earlier. And it’s rather disingenuous how you keep rocking back and forth between current generation consoles and 20+ year old tech as if it’s all current hardware. It makes it rather hard to reply to your points when you then when the goal…

> And it’s rather disingenuous how you keep rocking back and forth between current generation consoles

I never did. I never mentioned current generation consoles not even implicitly. I always talked either about the N64 or (gaming) devices that are constrained and cannot run linux.

Re: New Linux port for the Nintendo 64

#186

Post by anthk »

hnlmorg wrote: post #162
tutfbhuf wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How long ago was "a few years ago"? What model number was that? DD-WRT has been ported to the Archer series but if you're talking a ZyNOS based router then you're probably out of luck. Those ZyNOS devices are the real bottom end of the market though. This brings back memories :) http://www.ixo.de/info/zyxel_uclinux/ Sure, we are talking about low-end (real bottom) devices and date models here. I cannot recall the m…

> This brings back memories :) http://www.ixo.de/info/zyxel_uclinux/ Sure, we are talking about low-end (real bottom) devices here. So not just low-end, but a decade old device that was already low-end upon it's release. That's hardly a fair argument to bring to the discussion. > How about QNX then? QNX wouldn't run on something with Sure, if you want to strip out graphics libraries and all the other stuff and just r…

>QNX wouldn't run on something with An older QNX ran from a floppy with very few MB. With GUI and a browser with limited JS support.

>QNX wouldn't run on something with You could run Linux under a TTY for i386 with 2MB with some swap about 24 years ago.

Re: New Linux port for the Nintendo 64

#187

Post by anthk »

bluedino wrote: post #42
laoganmaplz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinatingly, quite the opposite! For example, the original Macintosh had only a small fraction of that to work with, at 128 Kilobytes![1] Certainly a modern GUI a la KDE, Gnome and friends would be well outside of its abilities, but a functional GUI is possible on a shockingly small amount of memory! [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K

It was IRIX, not Linux, but UNIX GUI’s were memory hungry (more than their windows counterparts). The SGI Indy which could be had with an R4000 CPU came with 16MB base

And? People ran FVWM and rxvt on 4MB of RAM for i386. Slow, but with 8MB it was usable, and with 16MB FVWM ran much faster than CDE itself, not to mention rxvt vs dtterm or even xterm.

Re: New Linux port for the Nintendo 64

#188

Post by hnlmorg »

anthk wrote: post #186
hnlmorg wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This brings back memories :) http://www.ixo.de/info/zyxel_uclinux/ Sure, we are talking about low-end (real bottom) devices here. So not just low-end, but a decade old device that was already low-end upon it's release. That's hardly a fair argument to bring to the discussion. > How about QNX then? QNX wouldn't run on something with Sure, if you want to strip out graphics libraries and all the other stuff and just r…

>QNX wouldn't run on something with An older QNX ran from a floppy with very few MB. With GUI and a browser with limited JS support. >QNX wouldn't run on something with You could run Linux under a TTY for i386 with 2MB with some swap about 24 years ago.

> An older QNX ran from a floppy with very few MB. With GUI and a browser with limited JS support.

It did and it was a very impressive tech demo....but it's not representative of a usable general purpose OS. Chrome or Firefox alone comes in at > 200MB. So there is no way you'd get a browser that would work with the modern web to fit on the 1.4MB floppy. And that's without factoring in fonts, drivers, a kernel and other miscellaneous user land.

The QNX demo was a bit like this N64 demo. Great for showing off what can be done but not a recommendation for what is practical.

> You could run Linux under a TTY for i386 with 2MB with some swap about 24 years ago.

That's still double the memory specification and yet Linux back then lacked so much. For example Linux 24 years ago didn't have a package manager (aside from Debian 1, which had just launched and even then dpkg was very new and not entirely reliable). Most people back then still compiled stuff from source. Drivers were another pain point, installing new drivers meant recompiling the kernel. Linux 1.x had so many rough edges and lacked a great deal of code around some of the basic stuff one expects from a modern OS. There's a reason Linux has bloated over time and it's not down to lazy developers ;)

Let's also not forget that Linux Standard Base (LSB), which is the standard distro's follow if they want Linux and, to a larger extent POSIX, compatibility wasn't formed until 2001.

Linux now is a completely different animal to 90's Linux. I ran Linux back in the 90s and honestly, BeOS was a much better POSIX-compatible general purpose OS. Even Windows 2000 was a better general purpose OS. I don't think it was until 2002 that I finally made Linux my primary OS (but that's a whole other tangent).

I mean we could have this argument about how dozens of ancient / partially POSIX-complient / unstable kernels have had low footprints. But that's not really a credible argument if you can't actually use them in any practical capacity.

Re: New Linux port for the Nintendo 64

#189

Post by laumars »

tutfbhuf wrote: post #184
laumars wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re not a bad and horrible idea. I never once said that. Micro kernels are, in my opinion, the future of OS development because they offer a bunch of guarantees which are much harder to achieve with a monolithic kernel (like memory safety, stability (eg a segfault in a driver doesn’t bring down the entire kernel) and so on and so forth. The problem worth micro kernels is that abstraction isn’t free. That’s less o…

> However on the N64 you don’t need any of the benefits that a micro kernel offers while you do need to preserve as many clock cycles as you can. So a micro kernel isn’t well suited for that specific domain How come that Nintendo decided to use them (according to reverse engeneering finds)? If they are not suited, then Nintendo should know that right?

I’ve answered this question probably half a dozen times already now....

The N64 doesn’t run any OS. It’s just firmware that invokes a ROM which runs bare metal.

The Switch, however, does have an operating system.

There is around 20 years difference between the two games consoles. That’s 20 years of Moore’s law. 20 years of consumer expectations of fast processors and fancier graphics. And 20 years of evolution with developer tooling and thus their expectations.

You cannot compare the two consoles in the way you’re trying to. It’s like comparing a 1920s racing car to a 2020s F1 car and asking why they are so different. Simply put: because technology has advanced so much in that time it’s now possible to do stuff that wasn’t dreamt of before.

Re: New Linux port for the Nintendo 64

#190

Post by laumars »

tutfbhuf wrote: post #185
laumars wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

N64 wouldn’t have been considered “constrained” when it was new though. To be honest it’s not really constrained even now, not compared to the sort of hardware you were discussing earlier. And it’s rather disingenuous how you keep rocking back and forth between current generation consoles and 20+ year old tech as if it’s all current hardware. It makes it rather hard to reply to your points when you then when the goal…

> And it’s rather disingenuous how you keep rocking back and forth between current generation consoles I never did. I never mentioned current generation consoles not even implicitly. I always talked either about the N64 or (gaming) devices that are constrained and cannot run linux.

Except you did:

“I think that Nintendo might use Microkernels [in the Switch] according to reverse engeneering finds shows their massive potential for constrained devices.”

Maybe you hadn’t grokked that pjmlp was talking about the Switch (Nintendo’s current generation console) rather than the N64?

Either way, my other comment[0] also applies:

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25559670

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