> Note this message came out of subj: ELKS Git repository up on SourceForge + patches applied > Hello All, > JB>Additionally, I wish to continue discussing options for making ELKS less 8086-specific, and moving to a compiler that can make ELKS more easily portable. > The last discussion about ELKS possible way of porting/evolution was going on here many years ago. As I remember, I've made short conclusion for myself out of all those quite intensive message "ping pong" and brainstorming. The conclusion was similar to: "The 8088/86/286 memory access models make programming for those processors very similar to many 8-bit chips and PDP-11. The 64kb limit is very strong and serious barrier that is not possible to overcome without serious performance penalties (e.g. FORTH or an virtual 32bit RISC CPU). The whole industry already found the way out by switching to a new hardware with 24/32/64bit address space, so most sources around the world is not possible to compile using 64kb code/data segments. If you ever run any virtual machine on 88/86/286 CPU with direct memory access to few MB of RAM then you would run ucLinux instead of ELKS. So, the only possible way for the ELKS evolution is to support EXE (i.e. multi segments executable) and probably support other systems with 16bit address space limit (including those 8-bit and PDP-11)." > Thanks, > Andrey ELKS on 8-bit machines? How cool idea is that?! This reminds me a good hardware candidate for it, Zilog's eZ80 microcontroller with 24-bit address space, e.g. eZ80F920120MOD board has 512kB extenal RAM which should be enough for ELKS. Some time ago I managed to boot Nuttx on it and telnet into it over TCP/IP (and Nuttx can run on various non-MMU architectures too starting from 8-bit Z80 through 8086/8088 machines as well as 32-bit ARMv7m MCUs e.g. Cortex-M4). In theory, old Z80-based MSX machines were also well stuffed for their times (enough for ELKS), and non-free modern-era OS'es like SYMBOS can prove good old Z80 is capable to run multi-tasking OS (well, actually Nuttx also proved that). -- 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
