Just because they existed during the Linux era doesn’t mean they ran Linux; Torvalds was writing for the 386 from the beginning, and Linux has never been written for anything below 32-bit.
Now, it certainly has RAN on that hardware through emulation, such as on a 4 bit Intel 4004, but only for the heck of it.
For one, it explicitly calls itself a “subset”; a subset is not the whole set.
If we don’t want to go just off the pedantics of language though, then here’s the thing: it was forked a very long time ago, and both have diverged significantly, I think. It’s a bit like saying Blink (the rendering engine of Chromium) is WebKit; sure, Blink is a fork of WebKit, but the two are very different now.
16-bit computers died off before Linux was even a thing.
The 8088 was produce to 1998 and 80186 was produced all the way to 2007.
They may not been mainstream, but they certainly existed in production to run linux.
Just because they existed during the Linux era doesn’t mean they ran Linux; Torvalds was writing for the 386 from the beginning, and Linux has never been written for anything below 32-bit.
Now, it certainly has RAN on that hardware through emulation, such as on a 4 bit Intel 4004, but only for the heck of it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embeddable_Linux_Kernel_Subset
Technically not the Linux kernel.
How is it not? It is a fork of the linux kernel.
For one, it explicitly calls itself a “subset”; a subset is not the whole set.
If we don’t want to go just off the pedantics of language though, then here’s the thing: it was forked a very long time ago, and both have diverged significantly, I think. It’s a bit like saying Blink (the rendering engine of Chromium) is WebKit; sure, Blink is a fork of WebKit, but the two are very different now.
I mean… obviously 8086 “x86” is more limited than modern x86. So obviously there will be reduced features and divergence.
And by your logic, because it diverged 25 years ago… modern linux is…no longer linux.
If you want a valid argument, its not GNU/linux since it doesnt use GNU tools…
To clarify, what I mean is WebKit continued while Blink became its own thing. Factually, Blink is not WebKit anymore.
Replace “WebKit” with Linux and Blink with ELKS.