Hi Jody, I see all of your points, and I was just going to write down the reason of my renewed interest in this project. It's just vintage and/or nostalgic and it's not really a business but it's just for hobby. But there are many pieces of software today made just for hobby, so I don't blame myself for this. > * The project has no active real-hardware testers to call upon. No one has > real hardware AND time for the project AND wants to test changes Actually I still own a very nice and working Olivetti M24, on which I managed to test ELKS a bunch of years ago, and on which I'm managing to put an IDE controller with an 8Gb microdrive (first tests succeeded), which make really easy testing the . I also tested MINIX 2.0.3 on this one, it's nice, but I think not nicer and expandable as ELKS is... I have different ISA bus network cards, two (original) 20Mb MFM hard drives, an EPP controller with a parallel port iomega ZIP 100Mb (already slowly working with DOS), and I'm still trying to collect more vintage/homemade hardware to put to work together. > * What can/does ELKS offer compared to other small OSes such as NuttX? Does NuttX run on 8086? ... > * The compiler we use, bcc, suffers from some serious limitations and > misbehavior. In particular, nothing can require more than 64K of code, > including the kernel. The compiler needs some work or we need a new > compiler. I was missing this one. I see this is a big limit, though I thought that bcc was a good and working compiler, and still I found it on modern gentoo repository, ready to work. What about (I'm just guessing, I really don't know it) the MINIX compiler? I saw it working directly on my 8086! Moreover I wonder what effort would require to improve bcc to avoid that limit. In my experience I also saw DOS executables much bigger than 64K still running on the 8086, what can we learn from them? Maybe from freedos? ["MINIX compiler" -> http://tack.sourceforge.net/about.html seems really nice] > * The "E" in ELKS means "embedded" and yet the only platform it was ever > developed for was 8086/88 PCs and the Psion SIBO. The 808x target made more > sense 10 years ago [...] What should ELKS be targeting today? [...] > As I would like to see ELKS target other classic CPUs (65816, > 68000, maybe 6809, etc.) [...] > * I have a TRS-80 CoCo and an Apple IIgs. Maybe we should port ELKS to > those. ;-) Well, I think that would be great: the big advantage of linux is that it can run an be ported to many 32/64 bit architectures. We can made ELKS working on many different 8/16 bit vintage computers, as I said, not for real business but for hobbyist purposes. I also can't see the real sense of the "E", at this point. > Most PCs going in the garbage now are Pentium II/III/4 systems [...] This project mission, as I see it, could well be to show to the world how a good code on a very old pc could still get the same results as many modern software full of garbage and overhead. Today a basic linux kernel is at least 3Mb compressed, and requires 256Mb of ram to work properly with various bash shells, init scripts, python, high level interpreted code, and so on (I'm thinking of Raspberry-Pi). To show it's possible to achieve the same or equivalent results with many-hundreds-times less hardware resources is a quite impressive and very educational message to send to this increasingly rapid growing [tech] world. I'd like to transform my M24 to a full working (small) web server, I think I can achieve this goal also with DOS or MINIX, but I think it would be quite boring. I think ELKS still has a great potential and its style is more similar to linux, and I really like it. I hope I has been verbose enough and I look forward to hear what others think about this. Best regards, Edoardo On Fri, Apr 18, 2014 at 10:03 PM, Jody Bruchon <jody@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 4/18/2014 3:26 PM, Edoardo Liverani wrote: >> >> I'd really like to help this project as I'm going to use it a little, >> and I would enjoy to help hosting a website with updated links, to >> generate updated and working precompiled images, istructions etc. >> I have a shared hosting plan I can use, whom should I ask to get >> current website sources and the permission to update a little and >> re-publish them? >> My question is particularly for @Jody cause he is the latest who >> managed to maintain the project sources. > > > I am still here to maintain the project. Unfortunately, I've run into a > couple of major issues with it that make its future questionable. > > * I'll happily move and clean up the website to my own hosting if there is > renewed interest in the project. I'll overhaul it while I'm at it. > > * The compiler we use, bcc, suffers from some serious limitations and > misbehavior. In particular, nothing can require more than 64K of code, > including the kernel. The compiler needs some work or we need a new > compiler. As I would like to see ELKS target other classic CPUs (65816, > 68000, maybe 6809, etc.) a compiler change may be the best option. The > compiler is the biggest obstacle. > > * What can/does ELKS offer compared to other small OSes such as NuttX? > > * The hardware ELKS is made to work on is (to my limited knowledge) becoming > rare. Quite a few 8086/88 machines have by now suffered capacitor failures > that have rendered them inoperable and probably junked. Most PCs going in > the garbage now are Pentium II/III/4 systems, all of which enjoy Linux > compatibility and are far more capable under Linux than under ELKS, even if > they only have 16MB of RAM. > > * The "E" in ELKS means "embedded" and yet the only platform it was ever > developed for was 8086/88 PCs and the Psion SIBO. The 808x target made more > sense 10 years ago, but embedded and low-power computers today are dominated > by 32-bit ARM and MIPS cores that happily run Linux (if they have enough > RAM, that is.) What should ELKS be targeting today? > > * The project has no active real-hardware testers to call upon. No one has > real hardware AND time for the project AND wants to test changes. I > personally have no 8086/80286 hardware but have a plethora of functioning > Compaq 486 and Toshiba Pentium laptops, all of which have Linux on them. > Without real hardware and a skilled, willing owner that can test ELKS on it, > there can be no proper development. I can use emulators but they don't > emulate the many various quirks and "just non-standard enough to piss you > off" hardware of the early IBM PC era (I'm thinking about you, Tandy.) > > * I have a TRS-80 CoCo and an Apple IIgs. Maybe we should port ELKS to > those. ;-) > > I would like to hear what anyone reading thinks. Please reply either to me > OR the ELKS list since I (obviously) subscribe to it and prefer not to > receive duplicate messages. > > -Jody -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-8086" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
