7 ms·
Linux on an 8-bit micro? (2012)
- poseid 10y agowas reading about instruction sets a couple of hours ago, the performance bottleneck is often the memory pipeline not so much the size of the instructions
- israrkhan 10y agoJust because you can, doesn't mean you should..
- paulannesley 10y agoVery cool (TL;DR: it's an ARM emulator for 8-bit AVR which can slowly boot Linux). Could do with a [2012] tag in the title.
- bootload 10y agodone.
- Jaruzel 10y agoWhy are people TL;DRing a lot of posts recently? Surely on HN, the joy is in discovering the linked content themselves surely? If you don't have time to read HN, and need TL:DRs then you should question why you are here in the first place. -- Vote down if you like, I joined HN to get away from inane commentary and TL:DR nonsense that's so prevalent on other sites.
- JonnieCache 10y agoas much as tl;dr is increasingly irritating when used in this way, baiting downvotes is also not cool.
- ggus 10y agocould you explain why is it irritating?
- Jaruzel 10y agoI'm not baiting down-votes. Far from it. Just voicing that TL;DR is annoying. There's a reason you can't have both text AND a url in a HN submission - it's to encourage people to actually visit the link. Next, we'll have people just copy-pasting the entire article body as a comment ... :(
- pjc50 10y ago> it's to encourage people to actually visit the link. You read the links? I'm just here for the commenting. If the comments imply the article is good enough I'll read it. (This effect used to be very strong on the Guardian's commentisfree site, where the top comments often contained valuable correction/context to the tritness of the article) > Next, we'll have people just copy-pasting the entire article body as a comment I've seen that done a few times; it's useful if it's paywalled/adwalled/unusuable-crashy-javascript-walled.
- ggus 10y agoI find tl;dr to be extremely useful to find out if the article is worth reading or not. There is no joy in being fooled by a clickbaity title. Also, HN is not a novel book, therefore I do not feel spoiled. I always silently thank people that write tl;dr. They try to save my time.
- bootload 10y ago"It is common to see newbies asking in microcontroller forums if they can run Linux on their puny little 8-bit micro. The results are usually laughter..." The reason why... "uARM is certainly no speed demon. It takes about 2 hours to boot to bash prompt ("init=/bin/bash" kernel command line). Then 4 more hours to boot up the entire Ubuntu ("exec init" and then login)." It is so slow. Btw if you ever ask about system compiles of Elm on RaspberryPi which requires Haskell, you'll get similar responses.
- ajdlinux 10y agoWell, it's not so much that as the fact that Linux requires a 32-bit architecture (and preferably an MMU).
- pjmlp 10y agoOne is better using a programming language with a rich runtime when targeting such processors, but newbies aren't going to search for programming languages with bare metal toolchains.
- dnautics 10y agoI wonder if you could write parallelization routines that make this slightly faster with a few more atmels...
- koytch 10y agoMultiprocessor AVR running Linux would be the next step, definitely.
- itgoon 10y agoYea, imagine a Beow....ah, never mind.
- jakub_h 10y agoReminded me of Part 4 of https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/FPGA-relatedWork/ComputerSystemDesign.pdf https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/FPGA-relatedWork/Comp... . Intellasys/GreenArrays are kind of similar but only with tiny local memory.
- oldmanjay 10y agoSomething about this just gives me joy. It's so ridiculous that it's beautiful.
- JonnieCache 10y ago>Something about this... I reckon it's probably the SIMM soldered to the breadboard.
- qb45 10y agoIt's perfboard. Now, a SIMM soldered to breadboard, that would be something ;)
- teddyh 10y agoMore like Linux on 32-bit ARM, but running in an emulator on an 8-bit processor. I don't think this qualifies as “Running” Linux on an 8-bit processor. I voiced the same complaint when somebody claimed to “run” Windows 3 on an Apple watch (IIRC), which also was achieved by running a standard PC-hardware emulator, and running Windows 3 on that. These are somewhat interesting accomplishments, but the click-bait factor is high.
- nullc 10y agoSo Linux isn't 'running' on your x86_64 cpu because cpu is microcoded... or transmeta? Or... Linux is written in C.. so it's not running on your computer because it doesn't execute C directly? Come on. There is a 8-bit microcontroller running a linux system, the rest is implementation details and semantics.
- derefr 10y agoI think the argument is that one would expect "Linux running on architecture Foo" to imply support in Linux for Foo, rather than support in Foo for Linux that allows Linux to run unmodified. I certainly expected, when I clicked, to read about someone's effort to rewrite a minimal subset of the Linux kernel to use exclusively 8-bit registers and no MMU.
- poizan42 10y agoLinux can already run on MMU-less systems (CONFIG_NOMMU). GCC already supports AVRs, though you may have to tweak the backend a bit so ints are 32-bit wide etc. These are not the big issues in porting the Linux kernel to an AVR. The major problem is that AVR is Harvard architecture and there's probably tons of assumptions in the kernel that code and data resides in the same memory space.
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- poizan42 10y ago
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- Rahmawati19 10y agowow...nice info http://www.tipsterkini.com/2016/05/7-cara-menjadikan-kulit-halus-mulus.html http://www.tipsterkini.com/2016/05/7-cara-menjadikan-kulit-h...
- david-given 10y agoSee also ELKS, which can run an (extremely stripped down and extensively rewritten) Linux kernel on a 16-bit 8086: http://elks.sourceforge.net/ http://elks.sourceforge.net/ Also Fuzix, which can run a Unix-like on a variety of tiny, ancient processors like the Z80 and 6809; I've ported it to the MSP430, a modern micontroller, and I also have a half-finished port to the Raspberry Pi that I must get round to fixing one day (hilariously, the Pi has more RAM than Fuzix can handle)... https://github.com/EtchedPixels/FUZIX https://github.com/EtchedPixels/FUZIX Both of those run natively, of course.
- userbinator 10y agoConsidering that the first Unix was on a PDP-7 with roughly the same computing power, and many embedded systems are of similar capacity yet also run Unix-likes, it's not all that surprising. (Depending on what you call "Unix-like" --- I'd say any OS with a unified hierarchical filesystem and devices-as-files to varying extents qualify.)
- aortega 10y agoMy final project for college grad was a unix-like 8-bit OS called picix, it worked in PIC18 and supported tcp/ip via uIP https://sourceforge.net/projects/picix/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/picix/ Hey at least it doesn't take 2 hours to boot :)
- 3chelon 10y agoI did something very similar, way back in '92, on a 68000 SBC. I pretty much copied the important bits of the Unix kernel, but all in assembler!
- z3t4 10y agoI don't know if it's a joke, but it's hilarious.
- hawski 10y agoCool project. Personally I like the idea behind RetroBSD [1] - port of 2.11BSD Unix intended for microcontrollers. I was thinking if a system like this powered by solar panel would be a good idea for poor countries. The idea is to have computing of the past in sustainable form available for poor. The main problem is probably to have a cheap and low energy display. Maybe epaper made in bulk would be enough? But probably such a computer can only be cheap if made in bulk. Maybe it could be cheaper than RaspberryPi? The question that remains is what about networking? Maybe they could function in similar fashion to BBS, but using shortwave radio? [1] http://retrobsd.org/ http://retrobsd.org/
- pjc50 10y agoIt sounds like you're about to re-invent the failures of "One Laptop Per Child". The one thing people in poor countries do not want is special weird incompatible systems designed for the poor. They want a solution which is adequately close to the western ones, just cheaper. Look at cellphones: http://qz.com/451844/africas-smartphone-market-is-on-the-rise-as-affordable-handsets-spur-growth/ http://qz.com/451844/africas-smartphone-market-is-on-the-ris...
- nickpsecurity 10y agoPerhaps a cheap phone combined with a cheap, keyboard accessory and bundled software would be better? Definitely include Wikipedia app on homescreen and Python w/ learning guide somewhere on there.
- hawski 10y agoI also think that smartphone will get there faster. Maybe Chromebooks if Google will play it nice, because of Android apps support and normal keyboard. However I think OLPC is different from what I have in mind. OLPC targeted children with OS designed for children. I am thinking about something more like RaspberryPi with integrated power and display systems, but with external keyboard. Also I think about it to be extremely cheap. $100 laptop is already done by Chromebooks, but it is not cheap enough. It would have to be around $25 or less. It should expose GPIOs like RaspberryPi so it could be used in more settings. It would be black and white and mostly text only. Basically my pipe dream. Maybe I would just like to go back in time sometimes and I am just projecting? It is just a loose idea, but outside of people's preferences economics of scale are certainly supporting smartphones.
- MissingGear 10y agoPrevious HN discussions : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8791812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8791812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5581851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5581851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3767410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3767410
- patmcguire 10y agoChrome gives some ssl-shaming for this site that I haven't seen before. An angry red warning and text that says "This site uses a weak security configuration (SHA-1 signatures), so your connection may not be private."
- dmitrygr 10y agoI'll take a look.
- patmcguire 10y agoDidn't mean to throw shade, was just intrigued by the new blinkenlights on my screen.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mastax 10y agohttps://security.googleblog.com/2014/09/gradually-sunsetting-sha-1.html https://security.googleblog.com/2014/09/gradually-sunsetting... > That’s why Chrome will start the process of sunsetting SHA-1 (as used in certificate signatures for HTTPS) with Chrome 39 in November. HTTPS sites whose certificate chains use SHA-1 and are valid past 1 January 2017 will no longer appear to be fully trustworthy in Chrome’s user interface.