I had a bit of a crazy idea today. Some would think I had a little too much spare time on my hands … but maybe there’s a point to this insanity.
Many of us have old computers laying about. Now, “old” is a subjective term. As goes the Weird Al song, “All About the Pentiums”…
You say you’ve had your PC for over a week?
Throw it away man — it’s an antique!
(Well, that’s how I remeber it… I might be paraphrasing a little.)
Not everybody needs a fancy box to do simple tasks. Pentium-class systems, and high-end i486 systems make quite decent X-terminals. As slow as early 486s and 386s are, they still are useful in situations where you just need a router or DHCP server (for example) to service a small home network.
I’m planning to put my 386 into active service. My Qube2 sits in my laundry, which is great. It’s cool, it’s a headless box with no need for direct interaction.
But interacting with the serial console is a pain, I have to get my laptop out, and plug it in. Thus I probably don’t do as much kernel testing as I should.
The 386 should be fast enough for this task — all it needs to run, is sshd and minicom. For a single user. Gentoo using uClibc sounds like an ideal platform. Why?
- Minimum bloat: I merge what I need, and nothing more
- uClibc is targetted at low-memory, low-processing-power computers
- Gentoo gives me fine-grained control regarding what features I enable and disable.
Now the box is rather slow booting Gentoo. If I boot root-over-NFS, it takes about 30-35 minutes. I can reduce this to about 20 minutes when loading from a local HDD (narrow SCSI, as it happens), but I haven’t got far installing it due to problems with flakey disks. The kernel reports a BogoMIPS reading of about 3.9~4.2 when running at full-speed (33MHz), and about 1.6 with the “turbo” feature disabled.
Once I get it going however, it should simply be a matter of re-merging dropbear sshd (the default one in the Gentoo/uClibc stages dies with a SIGILL), merging minicom and a bootloader, and voila.
Any updates can be done via a chroot on a faster box, then the binaries shipped to the 386. Bootup time isn’t an issue, since the box can just sit there running — 386s don’t chew that much power.
This is quite low down in my priorities, at the moment I’m concentrating more on getting Gentoo/MIPS 2007.1 out the door, hopefully with some newer netboot images for Cobalt, and maybe some first ever boot images for Loongson.
But after that, I may look at what the Gentoo/Embedded people have (particularly GNAP) and see if that can be adapted to suit the needs of older computers.
I see no reason why this can’t be done — I’d much rather see the code in Gentoo streamlined to work better on older computers, than to see the specs increased, as this streamlining benefits all — not just those with few CPU cycles to spare. 
