This kind of things makes me shiver when I think how much awesomeness author injected in his project. I bet he also had tons of fun.
Linux on an 8-bit micro
31–40 of 80 posts
Re: Linux on an 8-bit micro
#32And slightly on topic, here is Windows 95 on a 25Mhz 386 with 4 meg of RAM http://everything2.com/title/25+MHz+386+running+Windows+95
I personally remember running Windows 95 on a 33MHz laptop, although it had a Math Co-processor to be fair. :P
Re: Linux on an 8-bit micro
#33I wish he'd use a proper license. I can't mix it with anything like this.
Re: Linux on an 8-bit micro
#34That's impressive! I remember when "getting linux working on a laptop" was thought to be tricky.[1] ELKS was a linux distribution for old small machines. It was supposed to run on an 8086, and use just 512 KB (not MB) for ram. ( http://web.archive.org/web/19990117003949/http://www.uk.linu... ) ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embeddable_Linux_Kernel_Subset ) Wow, still sort of live. ( http://elks.sourceforge.net/ ) [1]…
What does ELKS have in common with Linux? Will it emulate 32-bit for the user-land? If not, I guess it's not binary compatible. So ELKS is not Linux itself (FAQ says so) and it won't run Linux apps? I don't see how they're related...
Re: Linux on an 8-bit micro
#35All that's left is that pesky 32-bit CPU & MMU requirement. Well the AVR has no MMU and is 8-bit. To conquer this obstacle, I wrote an ARM emulator. So technically it's Linux running on a 32-bit "macro", just one which happens to be implemented in some seriously inefficient manner. There are some real ports of Linux for "limited" architectures, like uClinux (supporting few 32-bit micros, including some MMU-less ones)…
> There are some real ports of Linux for "limited" architectures, like uClinux
reginaldo (a guy who posted his emulator (jslm32) last time this was on HN) actually uses uClinux on LatticeMico32.
[1]: https://github.com/ubercomp/jslm32
I'm considering trying to get this to compile on Emscripten. It's so self-contained that I think it will be fairly unproblematic. Emscripten's 64-bit math emulation surely won't be needed.
Does anyone know if a ARM emulator in JavaScript exists already?
Re: Linux on an 8-bit micro
#36I put his sources on Github. Since there are no modifications, it does not violate the license.
[1]: https://github.com/ysangkok/linux-on-an-8-bit-microcontrolle...
Re: Linux on an 8-bit micro
#37Next Challenge get this working on my Z80
For that you have UZIX (http://uzix.sourceforge.net/) or the predecessor UZI.
Re: Linux on an 8-bit micro
#38And slightly on topic, here is Windows 95 on a 25Mhz 386 with 4 meg of RAM http://everything2.com/title/25+MHz+386+running+Windows+95
Back in the time, there were even hacks to run Windows 95 in safe mode on 286 machines. 386 with 4 megs was the official minimal requirement.
Re: Linux on an 8-bit micro
#39Did Minix ever run on 8-bit? I remember running it on an 8088-based PC, which was sort of an 8/16 bit hybrid.
Re: Linux on an 8-bit micro
#40All that's left is that pesky 32-bit CPU & MMU requirement. Well the AVR has no MMU and is 8-bit. To conquer this obstacle, I wrote an ARM emulator. So technically it's Linux running on a 32-bit "macro", just one which happens to be implemented in some seriously inefficient manner. There are some real ports of Linux for "limited" architectures, like uClinux (supporting few 32-bit micros, including some MMU-less ones)…
> There are some real ports of Linux for "limited" architectures, like uClinux reginaldo (a guy who posted his emulator (jslm32) last time this was on HN) actually uses uClinux on LatticeMico32. [1]: https://github.com/ubercomp/jslm32 I'm considering trying to get this to compile on Emscripten. It's so self-contained that I think it will be fairly unproblematic. Emscripten's 64-bit math emulation surely won't be need…
I started writing one in Dart a couple of days ago, but I know others already exist, including ones that port existing emulators (such as QEMU) using Emscripten.