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Linux on a 486SX

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Re: Linux on a 486SX

#121

Post by cesarb »

bennysomething wrote: post #76
13of40 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1995, I was stationed at an Army base about 10 miles from the DMZ in Korea, and for the first time in my life I saved up enough money to build a computer from modern parts instead of scavenging them from thrift stores and dumpsters. So I went AWOL for a day and went down to a place in Seoul called the Yongsan Electronics Market. To my young American mind, this was a place straight out of a William Gibson novel. Im…

That Cron job story made me laugh :) Thing with Linux as much as I used it over the years, it's still no where near as compatible with weird hardware as windows. Windows just seems to be able to handle whatever hardware I've ever thrown at it.

> Windows just seems to be able to handle whatever hardware I've ever thrown at it.

Other than the very first few versions of Windows, the true reality is most probably the opposite: whatever hardware you've thrown at it is able to handle Windows. That is, both the hardware and its software (driver, firmware) have been designed for and tested with Windows.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#122

Post by accrual »

h2odragon wrote: post #27

IDE -> Compact Flash adapters are good for hardware of this era. new CF cards are cheap. Booting from CDROM was still iffy and some BIOS might not like some drives and so on as i recall.

Compact Flash cards are indeed pretty useful in old PCs. One just needs to be careful to buy the "industrial" variants that present themselves as a fixed disk to the system. Some operating systems won't install to common consumer CF cards believing them to be removable disks.

A handy tool for booting from CD-ROM is Plop Boot Manager. It installs itself into the boot sector and can manage booting from the disk, CD drive, and even USB on systems that ordinarily wouldn't support it. Plus it can be configured to have a cool animated starfield background...

https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/download.html

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#123

Post by cesarb »

AutumnMeowMeow wrote: post #90
Teknoman117 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get real nervous about posting personal retrocomputing projects here to be honest :) I just spent most of my free time in the last week trying to get the Rust compiler to run on a K6-2/500. Had a bunch of trouble because one of the newer x86 extensions (CET) chose opcodes which decode as NOPs, and therefore are considered safe to include in binaries for older processors. Unfortunately, they're only NOPs on i686 or…

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.

> I remember compiling Linux kernel on my Cyrix 486SX 25MHz (the one with a disabled-by-default L1 cache!) and it took an hour.

I remember compiling Linux kernel on my AMD 386SX 25MHz. It took a whole day (only awake hours, so probably around 12 hours or so).

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#124

Post by anthk »

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.

Damn Small Linux ran fine under a 486. I liked the black fluxbox theme.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#125

Post by blueflow »

accrual wrote: post #122
h2odragon wrote: post #27

IDE -> Compact Flash adapters are good for hardware of this era. new CF cards are cheap. Booting from CDROM was still iffy and some BIOS might not like some drives and so on as i recall.

Compact Flash cards are indeed pretty useful in old PCs. One just needs to be careful to buy the "industrial" variants that present themselves as a fixed disk to the system. Some operating systems won't install to common consumer CF cards believing them to be removable disks. A handy tool for booting from CD-ROM is Plop Boot Manager. It installs itself into the boot sector and can manage booting from the disk, CD dri…

This sounds wrong. How can a CF card be recognized as "removable"? Do CF cards exist that support ATAPI?

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#126

Post by Teknoman117 »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #87
factfindingisfn wrote: post #21

This is one of the major reasons why I love Hacker News because of small side passion projects like this. At Hacker News we don't ask why, we ask why not!

I get real nervous about posting personal retrocomputing projects here to be honest :) I just spent most of my free time in the last week trying to get the Rust compiler to run on a K6-2/500. Had a bunch of trouble because one of the newer x86 extensions (CET) chose opcodes which decode as NOPs, and therefore are considered safe to include in binaries for older processors. Unfortunately, they're only NOPs on i686 or…

I really need to get into the habit of writing about the side projects I do. It probably would help me get over documentation-block at work as well. I write it obviously, but it always feels like pulling teeth...

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#127

Post by throwawaylinux »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #43

Technically Linux could once upon a time run on a 386, but because the kernel is a non-modular spaghetti-code mess, they had to deprecate 386 support to fix something else. It's only a matter of time before 486 is gone too.

I like the potential your comment has even though it's wrong on every point, it is interesting to go back and understand why 386 support was removed.

Since the days of 386 support, the kernel has only become much more modular and portable. It quite possibly supports more platforms and CPU architectures and families than any other OS ever written. Almost certainly true if you restrict it to a multitasking >= 32-bit OS with memory protection and virtual memory.

Many architectures and ports that have been removed or not merged were not due to being technically incapable of supporting the port but due to lack of interest.

If 486 support goes away, it won't be because suddenly the code has become unmaintainable after being fine for 25 years since the 486 was obsolete! It will because nobody has a machine to test or verify fixes on (although QEMU has improved this situation), or because the kernel or the x86 port decides to adopt a new feature which is more difficult to implement older CPUs (cmpxchg8b as another post mentioned).

So your post is totally misinformed and wrong. So with that out of the way here is the 386 removal changeset:

http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1212.1/01152.html

Net code change is fewer than 400 lines removed, much of it in boilerplate and config options changing.

"This tree removes ancient-386-CPUs support [which] plagued us with extra work whenever we wanted to change SMP primitives, for years."

There were no issues with spaghetti. They can and did maintain it just fine for many years. It was not removed to fix a bug, it was removed for lack of interest in doing the work to maintain it. And the extra work was not because of spaghetti it was because it required independent implementations of SMP primitives. As you see from the code change it was likely not the code itself that was the headache, but the testing of it.

> Technically Linux could once upon a time run on a 386

That's a really strange way to phrase it too. A 386 was the very first thing Linux was written to run on. There is no "technically" about it.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#128

Post by int_19h »

asveikau wrote: post #62
wruza wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, everyone had stock-ish pc components and then came winmodems, custom-protocol printers and other oem hardware.

I was reading a bunch of these comments thinking "winmodems were terrible". Thanks for that. I remember carefully selecting modems. Most of the PCI modems in popular retail shops were winmodems so getting one that used the ISA bus was the first step. But even that was not the safest bet. Online shopping was nothing like it is today, so getting a known good model was more difficult.

The safest bet was to use external serial modems. Which usually meant Zyxel or USR, hence $$$. I remember having to settle on 28.8k USR Sportster (as opposed to the then already-common 33.6k - USR wouldn't fit the budget then).

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#130

Post by vvanders »

DrAwdeOccarim wrote: post #92
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.

We used to have a monthly computer show and sale in the DC area. It was like this but in tents at the fair grounds. It was heaven. What an incredible time to come of age alongside modern technology coming of age. I still have bins of computer bits just in case. Like 3.5”IDE to 2.5”IDE ribbon cable adaptors and shit like that.

Same for SoCal, I have fuzzy memories of flipping through boxes of shareware 3.5"/5" floppies and all sorts of with various hardware pieces.
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