Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could it finally revolutionize porting Linux to new architectures?
We'll surely need to pivot to a blockchain solution first.
Now you’ve got two problems.
New Linux port for the Nintendo 64
121–130 of 205 posts
Re: New Linux port for the Nintendo 64
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the N64 only has 4MB of ram, I think a GUI would be beyond it's capabilities. Still a cool project though.
Look around for GEOS from Berkeley Systems. It was a graphical OS for the Commodore 64/128. I was using this thing in 1986.
I remember GEOS, but when I got my Commodore 128, it was only a couple of months before I discovered the "bigger computers." I didn't have my 128 for very long at all, but I had a Vic 20 and C64 before that. I thought the 128 was way better than my C64, but way too late. I wasn't much into video games, so that didn't last long. Chronology thing, I guess.
Berkeley Systems, of course, is known for BSD.
Re: New Linux port for the Nintendo 64
#123To be clear, this is a tech demo; we're long past the point where running anything useful on a system with graphics and 4MB (8MB with expansion) of RAM under Linux is reasonable. You can barely get the kernel itself that small. There's a reason why even cheapo consumer routers have at least 64MB of RAM. So it's for fun; you won't be able to run any existing "normal" Linux emulators and you'd be better off porting stu…
A microkernel would be a good fit for such constrainted environments.
You assume microkernel means small, which is a bad assumption. Microkernels can be fat too, There are dozens of monolithic kernels smaller than the average microkernel.
Re: New Linux port for the Nintendo 64
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the N64 only has 4MB of ram, I think a GUI would be beyond it's capabilities. Still a cool project though.
The machine can render 3d worlds but a simple GUI is too much?
It's not rendering "3D worlds". It's transforming a handful of triangles and mapping them to 2D. (Good) font rendering alone would be above it's capabilities.
Re: New Linux port for the Nintendo 64
#125> "But why", I hear from the back. Having Linux available makes it easier to port emulators and fb or console games. > Most importantly, because I can. Good. All I can say is at least it is something different to what I keep seeing on HN. (React, Rust, Kubernetes, JAMstack, JavaScript, etc.) Probably present this somewhere in a conference (CCC, FOSDEM, etc). Who knows who could be looking at this.
> and fb or console games. Btw., what are "fb games"?
It is indeed frame-buffer as suggested by many and not Facebook.
See https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nintendo... for more information.
Re: New Linux port for the Nintendo 64
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I love seeing this stuff over the standard JavaScript lib of the month.
It feels like most of the Founder-type people are taking a break from what they usually do at work -- which probably includes checking hacker news. So it's left room for the more interesting things to surface over the "What happened to " or "How to raise your yearly gains by five dollars" or whatever. edit: Interesting is a personal taste, and while I have noticed articles on hacker news becoming more repetitive late…
Well, hn is basically made by a venture capitalist with the target audience of founders. A certain amount of bias should be expected.
Re: New Linux port for the Nintendo 64
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
TBH, if I recall correctly, something similar happened already in the past just by pure coincidence. I'm pretty sure somebody somewhere already experiments with self-porting AI malware.
“AI” malware? Is this like calling any internet enabled thing “smart”? Any cool features are AI or is this something else?
It refers to things like software that reads documentation, reverse engineers code running on the target system, works backwards from the target CPU manual and compiler toolchain to make object code that runs on the CPU, and generally does what a human does when porting code to run on another system possibly without a compiler and take advantage of flaws on the target.
I think we're half way there already, because of the number of tools for decompiling and code scanning for security vectors these days, the increasing use of fuzzers to discover unintended or undocumented features, including hardware features like undocumented instructions, and increasingly clever and subtle side-channel attacks for finding device state that is not supposed to be visible to software.
Re: New Linux port for the Nintendo 64
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
A microkernel would be a good fit for such constrainted environments.
You assume microkernel means small, which is a bad assumption. Microkernels can be fat too, There are dozens of monolithic kernels smaller than the average microkernel.
There are always exceptions to the rules. As from Wikipedia: "In terms of the source code size, microkernels are often smaller than monolithic kernels. The MINIX 3 microkernel, for example, has only approximately 12,000 lines of code".
But to satisfy your definition needs, I refer to small microkernels.
Re: New Linux port for the Nintendo 64
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
A microkernel would be a good fit for such constrainted environments.
OS design methodology doesn't really have anything to do with its suitability for constrained environments. There are plenty of small monolithic and microkernel designs around.
I would argue that a microkernel would be a good fit because: "Traditional operating system functions, such as device drivers, protocol stacks and file systems, are typically removed from the microkernel itself and are instead run in user space." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microkernel
You want to throw out as many functionality as possible to get your kernel down in size to fit into e.g. 1 MiB of memory.
Re: New Linux port for the Nintendo 64
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
It feels like most of the Founder-type people are taking a break from what they usually do at work -- which probably includes checking hacker news. So it's left room for the more interesting things to surface over the "What happened to " or "How to raise your yearly gains by five dollars" or whatever. edit: Interesting is a personal taste, and while I have noticed articles on hacker news becoming more repetitive late…
Former founder checking in. Guess I'm still interested in tech, even on holidays.
Do former founders count? ;-)