Submitted by In a Google Plus post, Alan Cox, of linux kernel fame, announced a new Unix V like operating system for the zilog z80 architecture. He’s been on a z80 kick the past couple of years, even getting into hardware board design. For those interested, he has has a git repo.
Seems the repo address have some trailing characters that makes it give a erroneous 404.
it’s “Zilog”, not “Ziloc” (in the post, the headline is correct)
This might be useful if we had a modern out-of-order superscalar version of the Z80, with 64-bit address extensions. That would be a screamer.
We do. It’s called a Core i7…
In a way, yes, although it’s not as though you can run Z80 code on a Core i7. On the other hand, if we had a JIT emulator, (and perhaps QEMU does this), then we’re all set there. But then again, why not run this on the bare metal?
But why would you want to? The Z80 is an almost 40 year old 8-bit ISA with no MMU, a chip that sold for $5 US in its prime. It barely qualifies as a CPU, its intended market was actually as a micro-controller for printers and whatnot.
That isn’t meant to belittle it, its absolutely amazing how much was done with this cheap little piece of silicon. All I am saying is this Fuzix thing is designed specifically to target such extremely low-end limited CPUs such as the Z80.
The main appeal of the Z80 was its price, its extremely low integration costs (built in RAM refresh, single power rail, single-phase clock, etc.), not its performance or its ISA (although it had some admittedly clever bits there too).
Just saying wanting a beefier platform to run Fuzix on is kind of missing the point – it exist for no other reason than to run on absolutely minimal hardware while keeping a more or less Unix like software interface.
A modern OOO SS 64-bit CPU can just run Linux or BSD…
“Science, bitch!”
http://www.osnews.com/comments/25758
Kochise
Ha. I’m willing to bet that Fuzix can boot to a command prompt in slightly under 2 hours…
My favorite quote from that article:
🙂
What, he wants to run a modern OS on an 8bit machine? That’s NetBSD territory!
Anyway, it lacks MMU so that takes a lot of the fun out of it.
Edited 2014-11-04 09:56 UTC