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Linux on a 486SX

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Re: Linux on a 486SX

#111

Post by flyinghamster »

I have a couple of things from bygone Linux days: a retail copy of Red Hat 5.1 (pre-RHEL), and a 6-CD InfoMagic compilation. The latter was especially handy back before cable modems came to town. I recall downloading an earlier Slackware, one floppy image at a time, over 14.4K dialup when 14.4K was fast, and it still took forever.

The InfoMagic discs:

Disc 1: Slackware 3.0 and Debian 0.93R6

Disc 2: Red Hat 3.0.3 for x86

Disc 3: Archive of sunsite.unc.edu

Disc 4: GNU source archive from prep.ai.mit.edu

Disc 5: Archive of tsx-11.mit.edu

Disc 6: Demos and Red Hat 2.1 for Alpha

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#112

Post by sobkas »

vidarh wrote: post #101
rasengan wrote: post #15

I ran Linux on a 486 DX for quite some time including providing shells to people on IRC. Don't run X and it's more than powerful enough.

A 486 can handle X just fine. 486's were our main X11 desktop machines at the office in the mid 90's (it has been the year of Linux on the desktop for me since 1995). The challenge is more that most modern X clients won't play well with a slow, memory constrained machine.

> A 486 can handle X just fine. 486's were our main X11 desktop machines at the office in the mid 90's (it has been the year of Linux on the desktop for me since 1995). The challenge is more that most modern X clients won't play well with a slow, memory constrained machine.

I remember when X switched from monolithic server to modular one. I had to buy new GPU because S3 I had wasn't supported. I have bought ATI.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#113

Post by AutumnMeowMeow »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #105
AutumnMeowMeow wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really cool, even if you didn't post I'm glad you mentioned it in a comment. :) I remember compiling Linux kernel on my Cyrix 486SX 25MHz (the one with a disabled-by-default L1 cache!) and it took an hour. Got it on a P60 and it was like 5 minutes. Good times.

Another one of my silly retro computing projects: https://github.com/teknoman117/m68k-fpga-bridge . I wanted to try and make an MMU for it, hence the 68010 specifically (which added some additional data to the bus error exception to allow restarting the failed instruction). I also managed to get someone on utsource to sell me a tray of 386EX33s for like $2 a pop so eventually I can make some 386 systems. I managed to…

These are so cool! :-)

I like retrocomputing too, but more virtually: https://jexer.sourceforge.io/evolution.html

I wanted to make a cycle-accurate 286 system once, just because it was such an interesting architecture. Protected mode, but 16 bit, and 16MB max RAM, but with segment:offset addressing. What's not to love about all of that?

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#114

Post by Teknoman117 »

Super neat! I went through the same process for some AM5x86-133 industrial computers with 32 MiB of RAM. I didn't think to change PHYSICAL_START or use musl. It's usually set at the 16 MiB mark so that the kernel doesn't consume any of the memory in the ISA DMA / ISA device zone.

One thing I would recommend that I didn't see mentioned is switching to the SLOB allocator in the kernel. It's more space efficient than SLUB or SLAB, but it is slower if you have a large amount of memory. (It's hidden unless you set CONFIG_EXPERT).

The main problem I bumped into for minifying a modern Linux kernel is that so much of the modern Linux ecosystem (systemd, OpenRC, runit, etc.) expects a lot of the networking stack to be enabled, along with cgroups, namespaces, etc. In order to get a minimal Gentoo i486 image to boot, I needed to turn a lot of things on in the tinyconfig kernel. Admittedly, it's hard to image a Linux/Unix system without some form of networking :)

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#115

Post by smackeyacky »

flyinghamster wrote: post #103
spookthesunset wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish cities in the US had those kind of sprawling electronics markets. So cool and useful. Like if you just need a single SPDT switch instead of a 20 pack on Amazon… you can’t do that right now.

Fry's was the closest thing we had, and it was thinly spread at the best of times (particularly outside of California). It didn't really even make it into the pandemic; I remember walking into the Downers Grove, IL store in the Christmas 2019 season and feeling strange at how few cars there were in the parking lot. I walked in, and was shocked at the state of what was an obviously failing store that gave me the willi…

I visited silicon valley in the mid-nineties from Australia, Fry's was like a magical wonderland compared to the pathetic offerings we had. I went a little nuts and bought enough parts to build a machine just out of their bargain bins.

I've often wondered why those places disappeared but then you remember nobody really builds PCs or other electronic stuff except as a hobby and most people are running laptops that can't be upgraded anyway.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#116

Post by leonidasv »

marttt wrote: post #48
gregw2 wrote: post #33

Dating myself here ... I ran Linux on my 386SX black and white LCD laptop (including X windows!) back in the early Slackware days 1992-1994. It was easier to do that back then than now... :) Oh,and a grad student friend of mine warned me in 93... "That Web stuff is addictive"... so I avoided it for another 3-6 months and stuck to FTP sites and a bit of gopher/WAIS. :)

> "That Web stuff is addictive" Prophetic declaration of the day. I'm envisioning a great hacker t-shirt: "That Web stuff is addictive... stick to FTP (a friend, 1993)"

Mint a NFT off this comment. /s

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#117

Post by jll29 »

This evoked fond memories of the first time Linux boots up with X11 (startx&) after installing SLS twice from 50 3.5" disks (the first round saw one disk cause a read error necessitating another trip to the nearest university).

Ran like a breeze on a 486DX-33 with 4 MB RAM, xeyes and all. Hard to be believe at the time - a UNIX in my own room! :-O

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#118

Post by Teknoman117 »

AutumnMeowMeow wrote: post #113
Teknoman117 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another one of my silly retro computing projects: https://github.com/teknoman117/m68k-fpga-bridge . I wanted to try and make an MMU for it, hence the 68010 specifically (which added some additional data to the bus error exception to allow restarting the failed instruction). I also managed to get someone on utsource to sell me a tray of 386EX33s for like $2 a pop so eventually I can make some 386 systems. I managed to…

These are so cool! :-) I like retrocomputing too, but more virtually: https://jexer.sourceforge.io/evolution.html I wanted to make a cycle-accurate 286 system once, just because it was such an interesting architecture. Protected mode, but 16 bit, and 16MB max RAM, but with segment:offset addressing. What's not to love about all of that?

Hardware multitasking and context switch on interrupt as well.

Admittedly I didn't live through that time period, but reading about them, they are quite interesting. It seems that the main reason they were considered "brain-dead" was because you couldn't run 8086 native and 286 native software at the same time, and backwards compatibility and interoperability started becoming something people considered very important.

Interesting enough that I went and bought a static core 286 (the 25 MHz Harris one) to play with. Since it's a static core I can run it at whatever frequency I want, even if that is only a few hertz.

https://imgur.com/gallery/LKAh7fB https://gist.github.com/teknoman117/342b43db8b79652c1c91e78e...

Things to keep me sane during the pandemic isolation :)

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#120

Post by miskin »

We ran our Java Users Group website in 1998 on 486SX with 16MB of RAM. It was running Slackware and website was served by Apache + JServ (this was before Tomcat existed) + MySQL. When I was sitting in the office where the "server" was located, I could hear when we had visitors - HDD was frantically swapping to switch between Apache and MySQL. It's hard to compare to the luxury we have with servers today.
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