elks

decades later there are fuzix and elks running on 8085 or 8086 respectively: https://www.fuzix.org/downloads/0.4/ https://github.com/ghaerr/elks

Oh yes there's been some ELKS activity lately. Does it support the 286's 16-bit protected mode at all? 286 protected mode has the 8086-style 16-bit addresses and segmentation. But with virtualization and protection. Not very many operating systems made use of it. The x86 world skipped over it directly from 8086 real mode to 32-bit paging. Edit: to answer my own question it seems the recent branch dropped 286 protected mode support https://github.com/ghaerr/elks/pull/235

Around 1996/97 timeframe, you could fit a kernel and userspace. I remember building a 1.44 setup that booted a compressed kernel and had enough user space tooling to bring up telnet, ftp, and the radio stack to drive the long haul radio cards (we were replacing JNOS [0] IIRC at an ISP ). Even had writable space at the end of the floppy (the kernel etc were readonly) to write overrides of the config; poor man's overlay I think, but it is rather a long time ago. Given we were working with 286 era hardware (maybe 386?), I'd be surprised if ELKS doesn't fit on a 1.44. Indeed, simply looking at the downloads page linked from the original link would have answered your question.. [1] 0 - https://www.langelaar.net/jnos2/documents/about.html 1 - https://github.com/ghaerr/elks/releases

ELKS supported MMU-less operation on 8088 and 80286 machines, but I don't think an ARM port exists: https://github.com/ghaerr/elks

Roughly in the mid-90s I bought at a local surplus store a "Carry 1" industrial 8088 computer which to my surprise I later discovered it could run Linux (ELKS: https://github.com/ghaerr/elks). I ultimately sold it on Ebay because although it was a beautiful piece of old tech, I was struggling to find more space for other things. Here's one. I had only the central unit, mine had two floppy drives. https://tinkerdifferent.com/threads/introducing-the-flytech-...

It might run ELKS https://github.com/jbruchon/elks

Not possible with real Linux, the CPU on the Furby is too limited while the smallest Linux out there still requires some more resources. Some small size Linux-like OSes do exist though: one commenter suggested Lunix (which I didn't know, thanks for the link), and a slightly bigger one is ELKS which runs on old MMU-less x86 CPUs. I managed to run it on a 8088 industrial PC ages ago. https://github.com/jbruchon/elks I should have a Furby buried somewhere; now that I think of it, it may be the right platform to stick a bigger brain into, make it wireless so that it could be connected to the home IoT network then signal events or alerts.

I successfully run ELKS on a Flytech Carry 1 industrial computer. https://github.com/jbruchon/elks http://elks.sourceforge.net/ (old Sourceforge page) https://vinc.prv.pl/text/299e3ed5-320.html

I've built an 8088 replica (Sergey's Xi 8088) and I'm having great fun with ELKS. https://github.com/jbruchon/elks ELKS is a Linux subset designed for the 8088, along with a complete toolchain (gcc-ia16). It's also actively maintained and comes with QEMU images and a dockerfile for fast, reproducible builds. Best to test it on live hardware, it's more rewarding and more fun a toy Unix than xv6. edit: typos

This title is sort of clickbait. I was expecting to see something about ELKS[0]. [0] https://github.com/jbruchon/elks