WTF?! A well known hacker has achieved the inconceivable. He received a stripped-down model of Linux to run on a 4-bit Intel chip from the early Seventies. Positive, it takes practically 5 days for the kernel besides, however hey, mission achieved.
Dmitry Grinberg is fairly well-known within the hacking group. He designed the firmware for this 12 months’s uber-cool DefCon 32 attendee badges that featured a Sport Boy Advance emulator. He additionally managed to get Doom to run on the badge powered by Raspberry Pi’s new RP 2350. DefCon infamously banned Grinberg and bodily tossed him, mid-talk, from the venue due to his affiliation with the badge’s {hardware} designer, Entropic Engineering, which DefCon organizers have been beefing with.
The hacking professional’s newest venture was the self-imposed problem of getting Linux to run on an Intel 4004 from 1971. It was Intel’s first business chip and predates Linux by twenty years. It’s really an inconceivable activity with out pondering exterior the field.
My newest venture: booting full Linux on an intel 4004 from 1971 for enjoyable, artwork, and no revenue: https://t.co/t3gVrscNcb#4004in2024
– Dmitry Grinberg (@dmitrygr) September 20, 2024
The Intel 4004 was a 740 kHz 4-bit processor with solely 2,600 transistors and 16 registers. Intel particularly designed the 4004 to energy the Busicom 141-PF, a calculator manufactured in Japan, so its listing of operations was primarily including and subtracting. It had no logic features. It additionally had about 4 kilobytes of RAM. So, there isn’t a approach to run Linux on the 4004 in a really literal sense. That is the place Grinberg’s out-of-the-box pondering and software program/{hardware} hacking got here into play.
First, he created a really fundamental MIPS R3000 emulator on the 4004. Former TechSpot fellow Nick Evenson notes in his PC Gamer piece that the MIPS R3000 processor hails from 1988, proper about when Linus Torvalds was writing the unique model of Linux.
“That specific chip is from the identical period as the unique model of Linux so it was a pure selection for the emulation activity, although it was removed from straightforward to attain,” stated Evanson.
“Removed from straightforward,” certainly, since we’re speaking about emulating a 32-bit processor on a 4-bit chip. Nevertheless, that did not cease Grinberg.
Utilizing a number of classic parts and much more {hardware} emulation and software program sorcery, Grinberg long-established a customized circuit board with a rudimentary show to point out {that a} barebones Debian distro may boot as much as a command immediate. Nevertheless, it will not break any pace data.
“Grinberg designed a customized circuit board with no vias (paths from one facet of the circuit board to the opposite) and solely right-angle traces for a retro aesthetic,” notes Ars Technica. “It is meant to be wall-mountable as an artwork piece, slowly executing Linux instructions over the course of days or even weeks.”
Even when overclocked to a whopping 790 kHz, the machine took 9 days besides. After additional tweaking, Grinberg received the boot time right down to 4.76 days. He significantly sped up his video of the boot course of to smash that point into one thing extra watchable (above).
