So? It's not the first system to rely on software support for memory refresh. And many 8bit and even 16 bit systems relied on the CPU for other tasks that are usually offloaded to external chipset these days.
The ZX-81 ran the display. The C64 controlled the tape drive directly. The Amiga, which had a long list of support chips, still had the CPU directly handle decoding of data from the floppy.
It affects performance, sure, but if you're trying to shoehorn Linux onto an 8bit embedded CPU in the first place, you're not doing it for speed.
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> I meant the external DRAM thing
So? It's not the first system to rely on software support for memory refresh. And many 8bit and even 16 bit systems relied on the CPU for other tasks that are usually offloaded to external chipset these days.
The ZX-81 ran the display. The C64 controlled the tape drive directly. The Amiga, which had a long list of support chips, still had the CPU directly handle decoding of data from the floppy.
It affects performance, sure, but if you're trying to shoehorn Linux onto an 8bit embedded CPU in the first place, you're not doing it for speed.