Vietnamese embedded developer Giang Vinh Loc has taken Linux to new lows, by efficiently booting to a console session on an Arduino UNO R3’s Microchip ATmega328P eight-bit microcontroller — by having it fake to be a 32-bit RISC-V processor.

“It is a port of mini-rv32ima (a minimal RISC-V emulator, able to booting Linux) on ATmega328P (the core of Arduino UNO, a eight-bit AVR microcontroller),” Loc explains of the venture. “So principally, this code is for booting Linux on [the] Arduino UNO. Sure you’re studying it appropriately, Arduino UNO can (theoretically, however not virtually) boot Linux.”

Loc’s venture builds on the work of Charles Lohr, who wrote mini-rv32ima late final yr in simply 400 traces of C code — the discharge of which triggered a race to see who might get it, and the Linux kernel the emulator helps, operating on probably the most resource-constrained {hardware}. In Loc’s case, that was an Arduino UNO R3 — a microcontroller board with an eight-bit 16MHz processor and simply 2kB of static RAM (SRAM).

That, then, posed an issue: the Linux kernel might be able to squeeze itself into surprisingly little reminiscence, however not all the way in which right down to 2kB. The answer: convincing the emulator that an SD Card linked over SPI is RAM, vastly growing the reminiscence out there to the kernel.

Efficiency, as you may count on, is extra proof-of-concept than usable: “Full boot time (from begin to shell) is about 15 hours and 44 minutes,” Loc admits — although this was later improved by the implementation of an instruction cache and a “lazy write system.”

The total venture write-up, together with supply code, is offered on Loc’s GitHub repository; “If you happen to can run this,” he writes, “you in all probability are operating world’s worst Linux PC. Get pleasure from!”