On 04/24/2012 02:47 PM, Gross, Mark wrote: > Thanks for the historical context! (I didn't get into linux until the > 2.2 days).
Computer history is a hobby of mine. You might like this: http://landley.net/history/mirror/linux/linux-history.html I went through the archives and picked out posts I found interesting from the first year or so here: http://landley.net/history/mirror/linux/1991.html http://landley.net/history/mirror/linux/1992.html And here's an interview with Linus from the end of 1992: http://www.abc.se/~m9339/linux/linuxdoc/linuxnews03a.html > so what is the likely minimal HW we think linux "should" be able to > boot on and say run a simple shell? What is Linux tiny's target now > that 2MB is out of the question? 2 megs isn't out of the question, but working in 2 megs would require running the kernel out of rom, with a filesystem in rom, using binflt binary format. Which would be crazy slow, but has been done. Running Linux is a more conventional configuration: kernel with initramfs plus busybox statically linked against uClibc: 4 megs is a reasonable target. I dunno if it _does_ that today, but it should be achievable. 8 megs is a pretty comfortable system, shouldn't require too much customization. 16 megs is luxury, you should be able to run a graphical display in that. (Your real limit's going to be your framebuffer; 1024x768x256 colors is most of a megabyte. Now add in double-buffering and the sheer amount of data you sling around gets big fast.) But the interesting thing is: these are all solved problems. Twenty years ago 4 megs was a reasonably powerful machine (Linus spent a couple thousand dollars buying his computer), and 16 megs was a high-end workstation. Since then we've gone to much higher resolution with more colors and 3D acceleration, and our low-end networking is 2 orders of magnitude faster so the buffering required is enormous, and so on. The features were added for a REASON. But we DO know how to make systems fit in smaller memory footprints because we've _done_ it, we just have to comb through the archives and understand how this used to work. Yes, the computer science discipline is maturing to the point where software archaeology actually serves a purpose. :) Rob -- GNU/Linux isn't: Linux=GPLv2, GNU=GPLv3+, they can't share code. Either it's "mere aggregation", or a license violation. Pick one. _______________________________________________ Celinux-dev mailing list Celinux-dev@lists.celinuxforum.org https://lists.celinuxforum.org/mailman/listinfo/celinux-dev
