genext2fs
genext2fs - ext2 filesystem generator for embedded systems (by bestouff)
elks
Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset - Linux for 8086 (by ghaerr)
genext2fs | elks | |
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1 | 25 | |
51 | 924 | |
- | - | |
0.0 | 9.7 | |
about 2 months ago | 8 days ago | |
C | C | |
GNU General Public License v3.0 only | GNU General Public License v3.0 or later |
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
genext2fs
Posts with mentions or reviews of genext2fs.
We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives
and similar projects. The last one was on 2021-03-29.
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Tar is an ill-specified format
I also have written my own tar parser, in https://github.com/bestouff/genext2fs - oh boy it's not easy ! My parser is of course incomplete and won't handle corner cases, which are really plenty. In the end I added libarchive as an alternative to my hand-rolled code because that's how it works best.
elks
Posts with mentions or reviews of elks.
We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives
and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-01.
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Damn Small Linux 2024
ELKS supported MMU-less operation on 8088 and 80286 machines, but I don't think an ARM port exists: https://github.com/ghaerr/elks
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SIIG MiniSys S286 Small Form Factor PC
Roughly in the mid-90s I bought at a local surplus store a "Carry 1" industrial 8088 computer which to my surprise I later discovered it could run Linux (ELKS: https://github.com/ghaerr/elks). I ultimately sold it on Ebay because although it was a beautiful piece of old tech, I was struggling to find more space for other things.
Here's one. I had only the central unit, mine had two floppy drives.
- ELKS Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset – Linux for 8086
- ELKS 0.70 released: Linux for the 8086
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My Happy HP 95LX is my everyday computer.
I don't think you can replace the OS on these. Unless there is a way to boot them from DOS, but you are looking at 8c086 machine so the choice is limited. Linux or BSD won't work. But ELKS might if it can be made to boot from DOS. Minix 2.02 seems to work.
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$5 Ai-M62-12F-Kit RISC-V development board features BL616 WiFi 6, BLE 5.2, and Zigbee MCU, plenty of I/Os - CNX Software
Yet ELKS works on 16 bit computers with 640k of RAM.
- ELKS: Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset
- Past meets present in this $200 mini-laptop with a Intel 8088 chip and 640KB
- Imaging an MFM Hard Disk on a PC XT
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Furby 1998 Source Code
Some small size Linux-like OSes do exist though: one commenter suggested Lunix (which I didn't know, thanks for the link), and a slightly bigger one is ELKS which runs on old MMU-less x86 CPUs. I managed to run it on a 8088 industrial PC ages ago.
https://github.com/jbruchon/elks
I should have a Furby buried somewhere; now that I think of it, it may be the right platform to stick a bigger brain into, make it wireless so that it could be connected to the home IoT network then signal events or alerts.
What are some alternatives?
When comparing genext2fs and elks you can also consider the following projects:
dracut - dracut the event driven initramfs infrastructure
IoTGoat - IoTGoat is a deliberately insecure firmware created to educate software developers and security professionals with testing commonly found vulnerabilities in IoT devices.