[HN Gopher] 789 KB Linux Without MMU on RISC-V
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789 KB Linux Without MMU on RISC-V
Author : yarapavan
Score : 82 points
Date : 2023-10-09 16:28 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (popovicu.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (popovicu.com)
| IshKebab wrote:
| I guess you can add isolation using PMP? I can't see any reason
| why ELFs wouldn't work, except that they are obviously normally
| built with virtual memory in mind.
|
| Great tutorial anyway, thanks!
| ilyt wrote:
| I remember full kernel with modules for hardware compiled in was
| less than that in 2.2.x kernel times.
|
| All else considered the growth isn't much
| RetroTechie wrote:
| Notions of what's "tiny" or "lightweight" have clearly shifted...
| :-(
|
| Interesting & informative article though.
| helf wrote:
| [dead]
| Medox wrote:
| Very interesting! Reminds me of uClinux for the PSP [1]
|
| Offtopic regarding the PSP version mentioned above: while doing
| some quick research right now (remembering that my PSP still
| works, as tested a couple of weeks ago), I sh*t you not, google
| gave me my own post from 2010. Right in the nostalgia.
|
| [1] https://psplinux.info/tag/uclinux/
|
| [2] https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=25416
| lxe wrote:
| uClinux has been my bread and butter back in 2010-2012 when I was
| running it on a mmu-less micro pfga core for an embedded
| industrial device. I think I brought it down way below the 789kb,
| at least the bzimage.
|
| I think I was using buildroot to configure and build the kernel
| and busybox for all the runtime things.
|
| I had to host a dynamic web UI on it, for which I built a custom
| lua "framework". Lua runtime was a 100k-something static binary
| that worked like a charm, and very very fast.
| wiredfool wrote:
| I remember Linux on a floppy in the 2.4 era. You generally needed
| to do some interesting formatting to the disks to get much of a
| user land, but you could have a router running from floppy/ram in
| 1.4->1.7 mb of disk.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Was it floppyfw? (0) I used it as firewall ages ago, and if
| memory serves was the one I moved to a DiskOnModule flash drive
| to make boot faster and more reliable.
|
| 0 - https://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/
| helf wrote:
| [dead]
| snvzz wrote:
| I remember muLinux from circa 1997. Surprisingly, the website
| is still up[0].
|
| IIRC it was a couple floppies, with an extra one for X11.
|
| It ran w/o issue on 486.
|
| 0. http://micheleandreoli.org/public/Software/mulinux/
| RetroTechie wrote:
| In the late 90's I lived in a house with +/- 10 others (mostly
| students).
|
| Internet was shared using Windows ICS (ugh!) on someone's PC,
| which was _also_ used for that guys ' regular work. Which
| included playing Diablo & such.
|
| Obviously a lousy setup. And of course internet (for the rest
| o/t house) was often down as a result.
|
| At some point people got fed up. And (having _some_ Linux
| experience at the time) I knew where to look.
|
| Put together and old Pentium PC with 2 network cards, _no_ hdd,
| and in went a floppy called FreeSCO. After fiddling with the
| software 's power management settings, I put the CPU on passive
| cooling.
|
| Shoved the box in a corner & never looked back - rock solid.
| Uptime usually limited by power failures or ISP messing with
| configuration of _their_ systems.
|
| Indeed: Linux 2.0~2.4 days.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Freesco! I'd forgotten about it completely. It was user
| friendly, menu driven.
| KirillPanov wrote:
| This is unreadable.
|
| Please, either indent your paragraphs or else put more space
| between paragraphs than between lines which are part of the same
| paragraph. One or the other, or even both. If you do neither it
| is illegible.
| tomcam wrote:
| Unreadable? Or perhaps just not to your liking?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I see an extra 20 pixels (specifically 1.25em) between
| paragraphs. You don't?
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(page generated 2023-10-09 23:00 UTC)