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Somehow the fact that this was accomplished by emulating a 32 bit processor with an 8 bit processor, made this less appealing to me. I'm sure it was technicall
by swatow 12y ago
Somehow the fact that this was accomplished by emulating a 32 bit processor with an 8 bit processor, made this less appealing to me. I'm sure it was technically very challenging, but I would have been more excited to see Linux somehow running natively on the processor. I wonder what the slowest processors running Linux natively are?
- andrewchambers 12y agoAlmost certainly one of thing things supported by http://www.uclinux.org/ http://www.uclinux.org/.
- JoshTriplett 12y agoFor x86, older versions of Linux ran on a 386, but current versions require a 486, or a Pentium if you turn on stack protection (as most distro kernels do). (Almost nobody noticed.) However, drivers for ISA and similar still exist in the kernel, so you could likely get the most recent kernel running on a real 486, if you had one around. The slowest systems still running Linux, though, are probably those running the m68k port. Many people doing development for that port use m68k emulators, which run many times faster than the fastest available hardware. However, at least in theory, you can run the m68k port on any m68k processor that has an MMU.
- Starwatcher2001 12y agoCan't comment on Linux, but we used to run Xenix on a 286.
- ansible 12y agoAnd you can run uCLinux on the m68k processors that don't have an MMU. I was using it for a Motorola Dragonball microcontroller... 14 years ago.