29 Aug
2011
29 Aug
'11
5:03 p.m.
On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 07:23:38PM +0100, Tony Duell wrote:
At least Debian still ships 486 kernels, which comes in handy for a lot of
folks whose embedded systems use some kind of 486 compatible CPU. For 386,
well, you might have problems running straight current distros, as they
tend to assume at least a 486, but if you rebuild the kernel (and maybe
the userland, but that might not be needed), it should work. You are far
more likely to run head on into the wall of ressource constraints. While
I did run a carefully handcrafted Linux system on a 486 box with 4 MB
of RAM as a mobile file server (old, crapped out laptop[0]) 11 years ago,
modern distros tend to assume quite a bit of memory. Not many 386 machines
with 32+ MB of memory around ...
Kind regards,
Alex.
[0] Building that was fun. IIRC back then OpenBSD died in kernel init,
NetBSD died before loading the installer, FreeBSD died in the installer
and somehow I got Linux to boot. After stripping both kernel and running
userland to the absolute minimum (IIRC, running user processes after boot
where init & 2 gettys, after logging in on the console the machine
was 4 MB deep in swap and paging all the time), I still managed to
get around 150 .. 200 KB/s NFS read performance out of that box.
Enough for listening to MP3s while working at a clients site ;-)
--
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison
I'm
sorry Al, but I have to disagree here. It's pretty rare for
device support to be removed from the Linux kernel distribution. There
are even ARCnet card drivers still in there.
Will any current linux version run on an 80386 processor? I was under the
distinct impression that they don't (in fact they may not even run on an
80486).