TOtodsacerdoti·Nov 29, 2020Submission
2 points · Open discussionghaerr
elks
C2016–2026
ghaerr / elks
elks
Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset - Linux for 8086
22Distinct people
27Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.7KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset - Linux for 8086
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 7:24:48 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year27 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-02-23 18:52:18 UTC to 2026-08-18 11:24:27 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 3 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 3 | 3 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
4 sourcesELKS: Linux-like OS for 8086 family
4 points · Open discussionELKS – Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset
15 points · Open discussionMore to the point, the real world doesn't run entirely on Real Computers.
It happens again and again:
There's a plateau of Real Computers, where Real People do Real Work, because they wouldn't deign to deal with the oddities and lack of performance peasants put up with on their Bitty Boxes.
Then something nasty happens, and those Bitty Boxes become more capable without becoming correspondingly more expensive. All of a sudden, the companies selling Real Computers no longer have a value proposition: Their stuff may not be hugely more capable, but at least it's massively more expensive!
Eventually, not even the Real People can continue to ignore the fact the Toys are smoking them in every benchmarkable metric aside from cool factor.
It happened to DEC when minicomputers fell to PCs, and it happened to Sun and SGI when the "workstation" categ
Read the rest
ory got folded into the "somewhat-more-expensive-than-usual PC" category.
Linux originally ignored the extreme low-end PCs, but in 1991, it was pretty clear than 16-bit x86 CPUs were more trouble than they were worth in the Unix-like world and it wasn't a good move to mutilate the kernel to fit on a kind of system which was rapidly becoming obsolete. However, Linux is not ignoring the current Bitty Boxes, the SBCs which can run the kernel with no compromises once you navigate the weirdness of ARM-based hardware.
(Yes, there is a project to run Linux on 16-bit x86 chips and other MMU-less CPUs. It's called ELKS and it was never very active.)
https://github.com/jbruchon/elks