I am reading "A Heavily Commented Linux kernel Source Code" book about linux-0.12 kernel and wonder, is it possible to boot it on my laptop? First thing I noticed is that this kernel expects to boot from a floppy disk, so it will require different bootloader.
But, generally, are there any other things to consider when trying to boot linux-0.x or linux-1.x? Are modern Intel CPUs backwards compatible with 80386, or it is required to recompile all binaries? What about periphery: BIOS, interrupt controller etc., does someone tried to backport missing drivers?
Linux v0.01 has been commited by Linus Torvalds himself in 2007 (16 years after!):
commit bb441db1a90a1801ef4e6546417a8d907c55d92f
Author: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linuxfoundation.org>
Date: Fri Nov 23 15:08:58 2007 -0500
Linux-0.01 (September 17, 1991)
which among other says the following
- In short: you really need some stone-age tools to actually compile this, if you actually want to. And if you actually want to _run_ it too, you need to have some old hardware and most likely edit some of the hardcoded numbers too. The harddisk driver has two different hardcoded settings: my harddisk, and Lasu's harddisk.
So, I guess for those versions which have 0 in the front, you may not use more or less available hardware.
v2.0.1 sounds more promising by date and by tool versions
Use libc5.2.18 with 2.7.1.3, libc5.3.12 with 2.7.1.4
You may conduct your own research since all these versions are available in the history tree: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/history/history.git/.
P.S> I have in real life i586 SMP machine on which I run (had run) v2.0.x kernels. So, I believe this is a good point to start with.