Comment Old Hardware... (Score 0) 507
I was able to get a recent 2.6.X series kernel to boot on a older non-isa bus 386. Building it was easy, turn off everything that wasn't necessary, enable some embedded features, etc.
Debugging it to boot wasn't easy. The machine had a non name processor upgrade, that wasn't recognized, which caused the kernel to halt. Once I got that patched, the cache wasn't enabled, so I had to patch boot.S.
So now I've got a kernel that boots, and turns on the cache and the $#@!ing keyboard won't work... There was some switch I had to pass on the kernel command line for the keyboard to be recognized.
I wanted to use ether-boot with it, but current version were no go on this hardware, and the older version I did get to work wouldn't work with my kernel. I gave up debugging it. It'll make a nice project for some sunny day.
I ended up booting from a floppy, and using nfs root, I didn't have any useable SCSI-1/SCSI-2 disk available, the only unit we had was a full height 5 1/4 unit, which sound like a 747 in your office when it turns on, it also drew so much current it shut off the power supply in the external drive chassis I had.
I made some other changes to get swap over NFS to work but it was horrid, evil nasty abortion......
I built a busybox userland and some other tools, dropbear. This machine did run X at one time, but I wouldn't consider it even an option now. As the machine only has a trueblue IBM vga adapter, and could only do 320x240x8bpp if we were lucky.
No doubt you could get X to run on some older hardware, you're just going to have to have the time, patience, and know-how to do it from scratch. You definitely don't want to build your userland or kernel on these machines, setup a cross environment and do it there, unless you have some crazy saint patience.
I built a kernel with it over NFS (10 Meg Ethernet), it took like several day. I used to build kernel on this machine, as recently a 2.0/2.2, local disk of course on it, within an hour or two.
Still pretty good considering the hardware is close to 21 years old, making it officially an antique that can boot a current kernel. How's that for legacy?
