porting linux on 16 bit controller

In short, no. The biggest MSP430s have 60k flash and about 20k RAM - but not both together. You can get minimal Linux implementations that will boot (decomressed) from a floppy, but that's a meg to start with...

FreeRTOS, Salvo, uC/OsII, one or two others... but you'll have to trade off RTOS resources against program space.

Paul Burke

The msp430 is a great chip, but it's at least an order of magnitude too small for even the smallest linux setups. For linux proper, you need a

32-bit (or more) processor with an MMU. For ucLinux, you can do without the MMU, but it still requires 32-bit. There is a project called ELKS (embeddable linux kernel subset, IIRC) which works with 16-bit processors, but it seems hardly worth the effort - if you want to use linux, there are plenty of small and cheap 32-bit micros (mostly ARM or ColdFire) that work with ucLinux.

There are also plenty of RTOS's for the msp430, both free and commercial.

One gets to wonder why you would want to. What application do you have in mind?

Many embedded applications require virtually no OS at all. In my own case I tend to implement a Forth kernel, which is almost an OS as well as a programming environment for building application specific languages, and construct the application from there. The benefit for me is the ability to easily certify from the metal upwards.

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Hi, I don't know, if it is really possible. But it is quite interesting and I have thought about it, too. It would be the most energy efficient linux micro :-) and relative powerfull as well (up to 16MIPS), if we compare it to the 68EZ328

with typically 2MIPS. One would have to create a hardware abstraction layer and try to simulate a 32 bit register with 2 of the (enough) existing 16 bit registers. Programm-memory and RAM has to be extended with I/O ports parallel or SPI. Then one must write a kind of software MMU, that loads and stores memory segments out of / to the external memory.

Greet> Is it possible to port linux on 16 bit controller made by texas

I think you should be looking at embedded linux documentation, they address all the related issues there. Site like:

this doc talks about how much their package needs, and what it does. You can extrapulate how much of that you need, and guess roughly how much mem you need:

Best regards, M