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What fun-OS can be run on a 386SX?

Ruud

Ruud

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Having asked about the minimum requirements for Doom in another thread and the answer was 486/66, I was wondering what I could run on my various 386, especially the slower 386SX, machines except DOS and Windows. I do have Suse 1.2 from April 1995 laying around but IMHO it is not "fun" enough. A good example is maybe MikeOS. ELKS-linux is more for 16-bit CPUs but could be fun as well.

I hope some of you come up with good ideas!
 
The 386 is the first of the new generation of architectures and any 32bit OS should be possible to run on it. Maybe even Windows 11, if you can work out how to attach enough memory to it. You could use virtual memory, but physical memory is better. The main limitation is the extent to which the chipsets of the era support DRAM. Some 386SX motherboards don't support more than around 4mb.

Early linux will run on it well enough though - but you will have to both get an early distro and then compile the kernel yourself to fit with the necessary support for what you want.

It might ne interesting to try Slackware maybe? I think it's still the oldest distro around.

www.theregister.com

Slackware turns 30

Who needs a graphical desktop manager anyway?
www.theregister.com www.theregister.com
 
I cobbled together an i386sx machine in the early 90s from spare parts from work. 5MB RAM, 15MHz ESDI disk, SCSI QIC tape, multiport serial card. At various times, I ran:
  • My first Linux machine...early Slackware. Linux dropped i386 support sometime in the last decade or two. I understand you can finesse that, though I doubt you want to run a kernel past the 2.2.x line on a machine with that little memory.
  • NetBSD, which ran quite well.
  • SCO Unix/ODT. Ran very well.
  • SVR3 & SVR4. Ran OK.
  • Xenix. Seemed to run fine, tho I never did much more than practice installing.
  • DOS. Ran the hell out of DOS, and Doom/Quake wasn't going to run itself. The SCSI drivers took a chunk of memory, so they often got left out. Config.sys hacking...good times.
  • Minix for a class thing. Meh.
I never ran OS/2 which I think is a fun-OS, but I suppose it could have (check the HW compat list). Coherent (unix-ish) should run.

Some of the DOS desktops (GEM/OpenGEM, VisiOn, GEOS, Deskview) are pretty interesting to play with. And there were Windows 'skins' that looked interesting (but obviously never took off). HP had one called NewWave that I only briefly touched but looked pretty cool. Xerox had one called TabWorks that kinda emulated a notebook metaphor. I never got to touch that one.
 
cj7hawk said:
The 386 is the first of the new generation of architectures and any 32bit OS should be possible to run on it. Maybe even Windows 11, if you can work out how to attach enough memory to it.
Click to expand...

Quite a few 32 bit OSes, some going back to the 1990’s (NeXTstep, for instance) set the minimum bar at a 486; the 486 added some instructions for cache control and a few other things that turned out to be really useful, and the 386 also requires some special case treatment compared to all later CPUs for things like setting up protected mode. (This, plus a bunch of tripwires related to SMP assumptions, is why Linux canned 386 support.) So… no, I don’t think you’ll be running Windows 11 on it.

(I would actually wager that a Pentium Pro is likely the bottom bar for any “modern” version of Windows; it’s basically the next sharp cutoff point. It’s pretty hard to find Linux distributions that don’t require a “686” anymore.)

Also, 386sxs have 24 address lines, so 16MB is the hard limit for physical RAM. It’s a 386 brain in a 286’s body.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
(I would actually wager that a Pentium Pro is likely the bottom bar for any “modern” version of Windows; it’s basically the next sharp cutoff point. It’s pretty hard to find Linux distributions that don’t require a “686” anymore.)
Click to expand...

Windows 11 is 64-bit only, AFAIK, so no PPro. Windows 10 came in a 32-bit version, so as long as you can put 1G or more RAM in your box, it's at least theoretically possible.

Sounds painful.

I know Linus has complained bitterly in the past about PAE addressing and floated 'maybe it's time to dump this 32-bit legacy' a couple of times, so maybe there's an end in sight for 686 Linux as well.
 
eeproks said:
Windows 11 is 64-bit only, AFAIK, so no PPro. Windows 10 came in a 32-bit version, so as long as you can put 1G or more RAM in your box, it's at least theoretically possible.

Sounds painful.
Click to expand...

It honestly would surprise me if Windows 11 has a 32 bit version, but I was too lazy to look it up and took it as read that maybe for some inexplicable reason MS churned one out. (Like maybe for VMs?) But by “modern” I was thinking probably anything… gee, I’m going to say Vista or later?

I know there are those weird websites/forums where people try to figure out the slowest CPU a given Windows would run on… I don’t think I want to go down that rabbit hole again, but I have a vague memory that even XP (or 2000?) needs at least a Pentium? (Like, people were claiming to have succeeded in running it on a “486”, but they had to use a Pentium Overdrive CPU?)

eeproks said:
I know Linus has complained bitterly in the past about PAE addressing and floated 'maybe it's time to dump this 32-bit legacy' a couple of times, so maybe there's an end in sight for 686 Linux as well.
Click to expand...

Even x86-64 is starting to be fragmented into ”Microarchitecture Levels”; a number of OSes have needed “v2” for years and “v3” is becoming a common baseline for HPC applications. (V3 being the equivalent of Intel’s Haswell or newer.) If you’re still rocking a Core2Duo or similar age CPU it is very much only a matter of time before there’s going to be if, ands, or buts when trying to install mainstream desktop Linux distributions.

32 bit Linux itself is going to be with us for embedded stuff for a long, long time yet, probably several more decades, but we will be getting to the point where “Linux” on these systems means a kernel running a BusyBox-style blob and nothing else.
 
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I loaded IBM OS/2 1.3 onto a 386SX-16 machine, found the floppies at a garage sale a couple summers back...
PC HP Vectra Q5-16S (1989).JPG
This machine has a Seagate ST-251 MFM drive in it that still works. The drive has a really distinct sound that I think is great.
 
How about ReactOS? I tried it years ago and was underwhelmed, but maybe it's gotten better. There's also the *nix variants, such as 386BSD and NetBSD. Another one is QNX, complete with its single-floppy OS+web browser (ca. 1995).
 
Chuck(G) said:
How about ReactOS? I tried it years ago and was underwhelmed, but maybe it's gotten better.
Click to expand...

Doesn’t work on 486 (or less) CPUs at all, and is considered unlikely to work with a lot of software on less than a “686”:

Supported Hardware/CPU - ReactOS Wiki

reactos.org reactos.org

Personally if I had a 386SX around to play with I guess I would probably explore oddball DOS multitasking things, like maybe a full blown DesqView/X setup, or maybe one of those weird multiuser DOSes that can drive multiple serial terminals. Or with enough RAM (8MB is the bare practical minimum) OS/2 2.x? It’s really too slow to be useful for any GUI OS, but with VM86 support and the ability to emulate full blown EMS 4.0 paging it can be a formidable machine for running previous generation DOS software.
 
The "i386" is basically dead and SX was never a good platform to run those "386 OSes" due to memory limits...No Unix with X11 will be happy about 16MB. Even Plan9 doesn't fit in 16MB. Even purely assembler written GUI os'es like Menuet want more than 16MB of RAM and want newer instructions than i386.
 
Zare said:
The "i386" is basically dead and SX was never a good platform to run those "386 OSes" due to memory limits...No Unix with X11 will be happy about 16MB. Even Plan9 doesn't fit in 16MB. Even purely assembler written GUI os'es like Menuet want more than 16MB of RAM and want newer instructions than i386.
Click to expand...

I'm going to be incredibly charitable and assume you are parroting things you've heard/misheard/googled because you weren't there. Because otherwise, this is comically wrong.

If i386 is a "dead end", I sure hope one day to have something I create suck that much. Introduced in, what, 1985, it has been produced in the billions, by a half-dozen or more vendors, and versions of it are still in production (e.g. DM&P M6117). And they run 32-bit OSes just fine. Some Chinese company introduced a retro i386 laptop this year to some success (https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Compatible-Windows3-1-Graphics-Integrated/dp/B0D47H8V4M).

And that 'dead end' directly spawned every x86 & x86-64 processor that came after. I can only assume you're inventing some bizzarro-world redefinition of '40 years of continuous use' that English speakers in this part of the multiverse are not yet aware of.

In the 386 heyday that we are talking about, servers had 16MB of RAM (hopefully). Desktops commonly had 2-4MB, with 'performance' boxes having 8MB; 16MB+ desktops were a processor generation away. I can assure you (that is, I worked for a company that developed Unix kernels at the time, and personally ran many of these systems) that we ran Unix, and X, in 4-8MB every day. The problem with the i386SX was the slow 16-bit bus, not the 24-bit address space.

But in case I'm not a credible source, maybe a couple of examples.......
For completeness...
So...no, just no.
 
eeproks said:
and versions of it are still in production (e.g. DM&P M6117)
Click to expand...

The manual for that is still on the factory website, but… just curious if you have references that show it’s still actively in production? The part dates to 1998 and while there does seem to be a fairly ample supply of it available through the AliExpresses of the world (IE, plenty enough to churn out those pocket 386es)
I wasn’t able to find anyone selling *new* embedded motherboards (PC104, etc) based on it. Considering the lack of tool chain support (it’s not just Linux, GCC doesn’t properly support the original 386 anymore; that’s why NetBSD i386 also hasn’t run on real 386s for more than a decade) I can’t imagine this would be a very viable product. So far as I’m aware the weakest x86 SoCs still actually in production are those Vortex86DX family things that are basically a PCI 486 motherboard-on-a-chip.

(FWIW, I read up on this chip a while ago, because I was briefly interested in the idea of laying out a CPU card/motherboard for it for desktop use that would be less creaky than the laptops they’re churning out. Like I said, it’s all over AliExpress for about $15 each, or was last I checked.)

One thing that is neat about this part is even though its ISA bus (it doesn’t really expose the “native” frontside CPU bus) is limited to 24 bit addressing its DRAM controller and internal bits are set up so it supports up to 64 MB of RAM despite otherwise looking like a 386sx. It’s a shame those Pocket 386 things limit it to 8MB.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Initially, it was much more lenient in terms of required hardware, which is when I last visited it. I wasn't impressed then, either.
Click to expand...

I’ve poked at it a few times and always ended up walking away shaking my head. It seemed harder to get Windows programs running on it than Wine, and with more compatibility problems, so… yeah, why not just run Wine if running a Windows dingus on not Windows is *really* a cat I’m getting forced into skinning?
 
Thank you for all the responses! Only this morning I noticed this thread is in the wrong category, it was meant for "386/486-based system" but probably got distracted somehow and opened the wrong tab in Firefox.

I prefer OSes that include sourcecode so CP/M-86 and Minix are excellent suggestions. The advantage of these two OSes: no further development so I want to tinker, I won't be hindered by "but version x.x already has that feature!". For nostalgic reasons I will also have a look at System V.

Thank you again!

Edit: it seems Minix3 is much newer than I thougt and runs only on Pentium+ with at least 28 MB of RAM. Maybe I should look for version 1 or 2.
 
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Ruud said:
...
I prefer OSes that include sourcecode so CP/M-86 and Minix are excellent suggestions. The advantage of these two OSes: no further development so I want to tinker, I won't be hindered by "but version x.x already has that feature!". For nostalgic reasons I will also have a look at System V.

...
Click to expand...
Ruud, Coherent's sources are now open: https://github.com/gspu/Coherent

Back in the day I would have loved running Coherent on my Magnavox 386sx-20 with 5MB RAM and a 690MB ESDI hard disk.

Instead, I "walked" Windows 95 for a little while (it was so slow that I can't in clear conscience call it "running"); when I got a used 486DX-50 (DX, not DX2) in 1997, I started running Red Hat Linux, and I've run a Linux as my daily driver ever since. I wonder how well this forum would render in Red Baron on RHL 4.1?
 
For me, I find the POSIX "i386" platform definition to be somewhat ambiguous. Recently there was a guy on another forum that was trying to run the "i386" build of Free Pascal on his "Pocket 386" laptop that has been mentioned above, and failing at it; according to him it was built with 486 instructions. I consider "i386" to be a shorthand for "32-bit x86" which doesn't generally mean it will execute on a physical 80386, even if the rest of requirements could be potentially satisfied. Your mileage may vary.
 
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