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Sergey Bugaev

@theruran @janneke

run you bootstrapping code on it with no OS whatsoever; hopefully it doesn't need much from the OS

you'd have to build in a serial driver or something like that (blinking LEDs is cool but you can't input program source this way), not that I have any idea about hardware

4 comments
theruran 🌐🏴

@bugaevc @janneke and #GNUHurd could be another approach, right? it can host GCC to build Linux already?

Sergey Bugaev

@theruran @janneke the Hurd surely can run GCC and cross-compile Linux; but I'm not sure you would be winning much, for two reasons:

1. It's nowhere near as trivial to do "syscalls" as on Linux — on Linux you place some values into some registers and perform "int 0x80" or "syscall", and that's it, you've called write or exit. On the Hurd, these all are implemented in glibc on top of Mach IPC, and that needs quite a lot of code to happen.

Sergey Bugaev

@theruran @janneke Here's a project of mine where I simply print "Hello world" without relying on glibc: github.com/bugaevc/hello-hurd — but that too is written in C, imagine writing it all in hex.

2. Linux is huge, but you can build it in a minimal configuration (see tiny.wiki.kernel.org/). Mach may be a microkernel, but it's minimal in functionality, not size. In fact it's a meme in the microkernel community just how large for a microkernel Mach is. But I don't have any numbers to quantify this.

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