This reminds me the time when Linus said that linux will be hard to port to other architectures, since it is tightly coupled with the 386 architecture...

Just shows that he didn’t have much knowledge of other platforms or didn’t have much vision about where his project would go. Fact is if you squint enough every modern system looks like a VAX. The same abstractions fit nearly every architecture.

Certainly would've been less easy without large community contributions.

At the time he said that he was not wrong. There were huge chunks of .s files that did interesting asm things.

> Yep. I imagine adding support for different CPU architectures will be... well good luck with that.

Extremely hard indeed, probably more like a 95% rewrite. Might however make sense as a killer application for small ARM or Risc-V boards where Linux would be either overkill or too demanding.

Would it be possible to make a "naive port" by replacing cisc instructions with essentially risc microcode (almost like how processors work now)?