uClinux: Linux for systems without a memory management unit

With GNU / Linux can do crazy and extraordinary things, some without much utility, others turn into very interesting and highly successful projects. We announced one of these crazy things that they have achieved a few years ago with the news of a Russian who managed to run an Ubuntu distro on an 8-bit microcontroller, something that seemed crazy and that took a lot of work behind to rewrite and adapt certain parts of the kernel to work with this type of hardware and I needed patience to wait the two hours it took to boot in text mode and the 4 to start with the graphical desktop environment ...

That madman who dared to defy the rules is called Dmitry grinberg and it did so on an 8-bit ATmega1284P microcontroller that only ran at 20Mhz, creating an ARM emulator that could run at 6,5Khz on this modest chip. 128 KB of storage and 16 KB of RAM are the figures that were missing to give credit that it was a great feat. Utility? Certainly none, but it was achieved and demonstrates the flexibility of Linux, something that would be unthinkable and impossible with Windows or MacOS ...

Well, there is another project that is no less interesting, but that is very useful in the field of embedded or embedded systems. Is named uClinux and it is a derivative of the Linux 2.0 kernel that can be run on certain microcontrollers that exist on the market and that do not have memory management units, that is, MMUs (Memory Management Units) like the rest of CPUs that we are used to using: ARM, x86, PPC, etc.

Currently this project has gone a little further and is a full Linux operating system with new releases 2.0, 2.4 and 2.6, as well as a collection of executable user applications, libraries and tools. If you are interested in creating a project based on this type of chip or want to know more about the uClinux project, I recommend you visit their official website.