I don't think the Spartan 6 can, it's an fpga with no arm, the zynq can, there's a lot of other arm chips that I assume can run some type of Linux, but the blurry ones are throwing me off
Edit, top left is a 286 CPU, and the Intel one has an earlier date, so they MIGHT be able to runwalk it, it'll be not good
Not only could mainline Linux never run on a 286, it also definitely doesn't count as an "SoC" to begin with. It needed a separate co-processor just to do floating-point math, let alone to manage all the I/O that a SoC does on-die.
286 Protected Mode is very different from 386 PM and there is no way Linux will would run on it.
There is a project looking to do this kind of, known as elks that has images for 80286 chips. I have no idea why you’d want to do that to yourself though.
Interesting. Reminds me of PC/IX, and it probably similarly doesn't even enter pm, judging from it running also on an 8086.
this is extra tricky because they did not specify the exact kernel. mainline could be any of the kernels tagged as stable that you can build from linus' git tree. i know that in the past you could run a mainline linux on intel 368 chips but today you probably can not because official support was dropped a while ago.
Part of me wishes I still had my families old 386 or commodore knock-off. Read some of the terrible short stories I wrote, play tanks. I remember when my Mom's friend came over with a stack of 51/4 floppies and installed a program that played the Loonie Toons theme song with their logo and Buggs Bunny captioned saying "That's all folks." It blew my mind, video (sort of) on a computer, how was that even possible. I wondered how they got it to connect to the cable cause no way a computer could do that. Dang I'm getting old lol.
If posted in the right circles, this might motivate someone to get something on a Spartan 6 that runs Linux.
Damn .. https://numato.com/kb/saturn-microblaze-and-linux-how-run-linux-saturn-spartan-6-fpga-module-part-i/ I was hoping to find a comment, maybe, not a complete guide.
Also, didn't know that you could run it in a microblaze instance
You can run a "soft" (semi-hard?) Processor on a Spartan, you could run Linux on that at least.
I just go by the colour - I don't like the slightly maroon Qualcomm one.
It's like picking politicians but different - with then I go by their haircuts...
With enough grit and time, yes :D
Edit: ok not mainline, but Linux in some form or another anyway.
OH MAN. I worked on an Android tablet that used a rockchip CPU, not the one listed here but an older one (I think RK3026). What a PIECE OF SHIT. I don't wish that tablet on my worst enemy. Battery life was like sub 2 hours with a 3200 mAh battery. Sometimes it would start running hot, and you could watch the batter percentage go down one percent every 10-20 seconds. The only way to break it out was to reboot it or let it die.
We later upgraded our CPU to the 3288, one gen older than this one, and it was significantly improved, but still very entry level.
Anything that's turning complete, has enough ram, and has a c compiler can run Linux. Theoretically, you could program a CPLD to run brainfuck and you could still run Linux.
Yes. Any turing complete processor can perfectly emulate any other turing complete processor, whether it is x86, arm, or riscv. Mainline Linux can then run on this emulated processor without modification.
Emulated processors can do the same things as physical processors, including booting from disk.
Boot = Bootstrap
If you've loaded up a virtual CPU first that's not a boot of mainline Linux on the CPU.
I respectfully disagree. The turning machine is not doing any set-up before the emulated CPU begins execution, and all of the actual BIOS is done by the emulated CPU.
Yes, but it doesn't count, because the SoC from the picture didn't boot Linux, an emulated machine did.
That's why the records on doing this silly stuff on progressively smaller microcontroller use the word "run". It has more transitivity.
I'm not sure I understand your argument. Are you saying that the emulated processor executes instructions while the SoC doesn't? Every instruction that goes to the x86 is broken down into several SoC instructions, which the SoC executes in order to emulate what an x86 would do. Saying that the emulated x86 is booting/running Linux, but the SoC is not is like saying that computers can't run java code, they can only run jvm.
I'm saying it runs it because "running" is transitive, but doesn't boot it because "booting" is not. Similarly to how you can carry your grandkid by carrying your kid who carries their kid (carrying is transitive), but you can't give birth to your grandkid by giving birth to your kid who'd give birth to their kid (giving birth is not transitive).
I remember this captcha. I gave up after about the fourth round. The prize just wasn't worth it, and I wasn't on a machine where I could try scripting out a solution.
ARM really shot itself in the foot by making it so every SOC needs to have a custom OS image tailored to it. x86 meanwhile lets you pick a universal binary that'll sort itself out at runtime
