I hope this is the correct thread for this. I am not talking about installing it on a IBM compatible PC, I am talking about using custom hardware made out of various ICs (TTLs for instance). Projects like this have been successful, like Magic-1. Its clockspeed is around 4 MHZ.

To get to the point, can Linux run on a (16 bit) 4 MHZ proccessor? I know the author of Magic-1 ported Minix to it and some other people who did similar things ported other OSes to their respective computers.

Well, yes and no. I am sure it can run but you may have to wait. We used to have a 10mhz system on old ships that run a type of unix. It was only text based and I am not sure if there is a word that correctly states how slow it was.

Hi,

Sure you can get Linux to run on smaller systems as long as the acrhitecture is supported. Look at embeds. Do a search here on LQ. As long as the kernel and tools are available there's no reason you could not develop something for a single board system that is home brewed. I would develop on a desktop or equivalent then port to the system. Much easier than to attempt to perform development on the actual embed. Sure debug will be better on the resident but emulation is a possibility.

BTW, that will be a lot to bite & chew. It may be better to get a single embed system along with the tools to get familiar with but if you want to smoke a system together then albeit go for it.

I think there is a difference between what unix will run on, and what linux will run on.
There was a project in days past to port the linux kernel to the 80286, which died, iirc. All the memory control stuff presumes a 386 minimum. Unix will run on primitive machines (motorola'as 68000 for instance) but you may need another kernel. The 80286, btw could take extra memory on the isa card but you couldn't see it without a driver, and the hardware was against you, as was the cpu architecture. Mind you, even my phone has an arm 32 bit. I'm not sure there is merit in reinventing such a limited version of the wheel.