Linux on C64, 8086, & Intel 4004

With a little work, Linux can boot on 8 and 4 bit CPUs from the 1970s. Slowly.

More from The Lunduke Journal:

[johnrickard]

What gets me is that this CPU is literally a calculator... And not of the graphing variety

[niclash]

Next; Linux on the Apollo flight computer ;-)

[thecrow]

Booting the 4004 took 5 days lol. The C64 was fast in comparison with 'just' 39 hours. Its so awesome people just do these kinds of silly things for fun and making it work!

[abram]

AFAIK, 4004 wasn't really a "4-bit" CPU; rather, it was an 8-bit CPU with a 4-bit data bus

[justinhall]

The 4004 cannot address more than 4kb of RAM! HOW???

[gblargg]

It's easy to downplay this because it's emulating a CPU rather than being compiled directly to 4004 machine code, but ANY Linux implemented on such a limited system would have to use some kind of interpreter to reduce the code size or it would be absolutely massive.

[mirror]

I learned about 'nibble's when self studying x86 assembly from books over 20 years ago. I presume it didn't completely fade out from there too and is just that assembly programming has faded from being any mainstream thing. As for what would be next, you are probably right about it being nontransistor computers. I can't see it as a practical challenge for tube based computer work so maybe someone would try to make a 'mechanical' replacement for a transistor and boot it there. Kinda feel like emulating another architecture is a cheat in itself though so in my eyes they lost points at that step..

[mmille]

Now you're reminding me. I saw a video of this on Hackaday. It showed a C-64 booting Linux, but it turns out it was sped up a lot. The video might've been from an emulator that could be accelerated. I remember the person who made the video said that doing the full boot process at actual speed took something like *a few days, or a week!!* So, um, not useful, lol...

[TheEVEInspiration]

But it is useful, just not for normal usage.
It will show clearly what is essential and what is not and probably discover some bugs along the way.
And where there is overhead, lessons that can be applied in other contexts.

[cantileveredapotheosis]

Did ELKS ever get x86 processes to handle more than 64kb, I thought they didn't have a good compiler to handle 'far memory' kind of pointers, and a linker that can handler that sort of thing. Effectively you can think of it like running DOS 'tiny' memory model processes

[larsulrich]

I remember using MINIX on an 8086. It was a miserable experience.

[fyodorx]

People unfairly neglect the mainframe world: there were some great machines from CDC and Burroughs, and of course IBM MVS.

However, finding real hardware would be very difficult, since it was targeted to organizations not individuals, and it was often leased and then recycled (or sent to the Eastern Block ;-))

[siwiecministro]

Doom didn't run well on 386 DX 40MHz. I cannot imagine it running on 8086 or something.

[Phil-D]

4 or 5 days to start up on the 4004 is funny

[MotownBatman]

I Saw this Yesterday I think;
My INstant thought was, Linux is 32Bit, This has to be a Late April-Fools LOL

[Rod_Knee]

I'd love to see a distro that would work on an Amiga 1200.

[ernestuz]

I have Linux running 8n my c64, now it's time for WORLD DOMINATION!

[AndrewRoberts]

WHY? Using anything less than a 25MHz i486DX or 33MHz ARM3 box, with 8MB of memory, 100MB of HDD space, with a swap partition, was painful in 1995 (by 90s standards), and about the minimum spec necessary for startx not to hang, or for a tcp/ip stack to not constantly swap, to permit you to ftp the latest drivers, which would take an age for a kernel compile.

[replikvltyoutube]

is it that riscv emulator that runs basic riscv linux?

[tehdudezorz]

6502 Please. :p Just watched the video so never mind. Although they did 6510 not the 6502. Also, this takes 256k. that was a LOT of memory back then. "1971 was over a billion years ago" Ouch. Hey man take it easy.