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pjmlp

Hence why ARM mbed, RTOS, NuttX and now TinyAra (yet another Tizen effort) are fighting for the tiny embedded devices.

My first distribution was Slackware 2.0 running on a Pentium 75 MHz, with 4MB RAM and 512 MB HDD, long long time ago.

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Compiling the kernel on a 486 took a freakishly long time, but it was worth it - it gave you more RAM to play with.

Once I upgraded to PII I could comfortably compile it in like 20 minutes or so. That was nice.

I think I knew the ncurses kernel config interface by heart - it's only awkward to use during the first 100 times or so.

Slackware came with two 3.5" disks a boot disk and root disk. The root disk contained the root filesystem, he boot disk the kernel. At that time the kernel fit onto a single 3.5", 1.44 MiB floppy disk.

I made my own distro back then. Started from source with everything. It fit on a 3.5" floppy, and had room for an IPX client that could download stuff from a fileserver, after formatting the local drive (it was an automated reinstaller for a computer lab when kids trashed the Win16 computers).

That's how I learned the whole boot chain diagram - hands on, trial and error.

Heavily compressed and carefully pruned, it is still possible to squeeze modern (4.9) kernel into under 1.44MiB, and kernel+rootfs into 3-ish MiB:

http://downloads.lede-project.org/releases/17.01.4/targets/i...

I remember a linux distro that pushed a 2.3 (or 2.1?) kernel and some tools on to two 1.44 MB disks. In involved booting dos, creating a ram-disk, decompressing with them some slow and esoteric dos program and then boot into the initrd with linload.

Cramping linux onto a floppy has been a challenge for as long as i use linux.

Yep, I got it on a CD-ROM, but since my drive was IDE based it wasn't reckognized by the basic boot loader.

I had to copy the tarballs into the MS-DOS partition, boot with those floppies you mention, and then at a given moment give the path to that directory.

I remember the days of 'make zimage' complaining that the resulting kernel was too big for a floppy disk and that I should use 'make bzimage' instead.

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