Linux on an 8-Bit Micro?

Somebody did this with normal 8-bit hardware about 5-10 years ago. Like the current instance, that one also took several hours to get to a commandline prompt.

It's the age-old trade-off, power versus speed. The more powerful your CPU and peripherals, the less time and/or number of instructions required taken to do each particular job along the way to get to that prompt.

I remember looking at the number of instructions required to do 32-bit additions on a 4MHz 8-bit Z80 once. All of those instructions were replaced by one single (and much faster!) instruction on a 33MHz 80386 CPU.

(2012)

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My favorite line from the article:

> To conquer this obstacle, I wrote an ARM emulator.. Why write one instead of porting one? Well, porting someone else's code is no fun, plus none of the emulators I saw out there were written in a way that would make them easy to port to an 8-bit device.