Ken Moffat wrote: > On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 07:53:38AM -0500, Eleanore Boyd wrote: >> That would depend on how far back you're interested in going, and >> how much you're willing to look into it. For compatibility with most >> things, you would be interested in getting a "i386-pc-linux-gnu" >> target triplet, which might involve getting older packages, or >> setting some options in the environment prior to building anything. >> > I believe fedora and debian do something like this. In LFS, we > have a note on the glibc page: Because Glibc no longer supports i386, > its developers say to use the compiler flag -march=i486 when > building it for x86 machines. > >> On a side note, to be compatible with almost all IBM based >> computers, I think you're looking at getting, say, >> "i086-pc-linux-gnu" or "i186-pc-linux-gnu" as those would correspond >> to the earliest days of the Intel instruction set. >> >> Elly > > *smiles* - nice idea. This is now old history (my first > pc-compatible used a 286, before that I'd used Z80 machines), but > anything capable of running linux always needed to be 386 or > greater. When I started using linux (late 1999), I had some > 586-class machines (original pentium, and AMD K6. With very rare > exceptions (some of the early VIA processors), anything from recent > years will be 686.
Right. On of the primary goals of Linux was to use 32-bit addresses, not the 16:16 (effectively 20 bit) addresses of the 8086 and 80286. I think the main issue of building for older '386 systems would be the kernel drivers and other configuration settings, but running anything, even a command line, would be incredibly slow. I think the '386 systems peaked out at about 100MHz. -- Bruce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
