from Hacker News

Linux on an 8bit Microcontroller (2012)

by exar0815 on 10/14/23, 7:59 AM with 37 comments

• by ostenning on 10/15/23, 12:58 AM

  “It takes about 2 hours to boot to bash prompt ("init=/bin/bash" kernel command line). Then 4 more hours to boot up the entire Ubuntu ("exec init" and then login). Starting X takes a lot longer.”

  I laughed at this - amazing work once again.

• by sandreas on 10/15/23, 9:38 AM

  Nice, but I prefer something slightly more Powerful like the Unihiker with a Rockchip 3308 (https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2691.html, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmBhBfV3Kfw) or the Funkey S (https://www.funkey-project.com/) with an Allwinner V3s... or even the non open X-Boy Plus (https://github.com/hsinyuwang/X-Boy) with Allwinner T113-S3.

  I'm still keeping an Eye on these device types because someday I hope it will be possible to create my personal Audio Player / iPod Nano clone with Wifi and long battery life by putting a buildroot based image (https://github.com/FunKey-Project/FunKey-OS) and Running a C# or Flutter UI on the framebuffer (https://docs.avaloniaui.net/docs/guides/deep-dives/running-o...)

  I think Mango Pis Cyberpad 1 is pretty close to my wishes, but I haven't had the time to check it out :-) https://mangopi.org/cp1m

• by rapnie on 10/15/23, 6:07 AM

  Do people know about new RISC-V based boards to experiment with? The other day I found Milk-V Duo [0], a $9 computer that runs Linux, and watched a cool video demonstration [1]. Another interesting board is the BeagleV®-Ahead [2], but there must be many more such open source HW/SW projects.

  [0] https://milkv.io/duo

  [1] https://yewtu.be/watch?v=z-GoLDQHYsE

  [2] https://www.beagleboard.org/boards/beaglev-ahead

  Update: Found this discussion on the Milk-V of 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36377439

• by dmitrygr on 10/15/23, 5:34 PM

  I do like how this comes up here almost perfectly once a year :)

  I did improve upon this more recently: http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=33.%20LinuxCard

• by ddtaylor on 10/15/23, 3:37 AM

  Obviously now we run Doom on it.

• by fsiefken on 10/15/23, 5:05 AM

  I wonder if fuzix could be run on it and would result in a nore performant OS environment

• by roschdal on 10/15/23, 7:00 AM

  Linux on an Arduino, that's one of my dreams.

• by mihaigalos on 10/15/23, 8:18 AM

  Amazing. Congrats.

• by cdelsolar on 10/15/23, 2:15 AM

  this is amazing lmao

• by KingLancelot on 10/15/23, 3:04 AM

  Why are 8bit microcontrollers still a thing?