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The m68k port is well maintained and is one of the oldest Linux ports of all. There are multiple active kernel maintainers and the port is regularly seeing imp
by cbmuser 6y ago
The m68k port is well maintained and is one of the oldest Linux ports of all.
There are multiple active kernel maintainers and the port is regularly seeing improvements and new drivers such as for the X-Surf 100 ethernet card for the Amiga or the ICY board (an I2C board) for the Amiga.
There is also ongoing work to support LLVM [1] and consequently Rust [2] on Motorola 68000.
Disclaimer: I'm Debian's primary maintainer of the m68k port and I'm supporting a lot of these efforts directly or indirectly.
> [1] https://github.com/M680x0/M680x0-mono-repo https://github.com/M680x0/M680x0-mono-repo
> [2] https://github.com/glaubitz/rust/tree/m68k-linux https://github.com/glaubitz/rust/tree/m68k-linux
- winrid 6y agoThank you!! By the way, just curious, what draws you to work on it? Edit: OP explains here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23675025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23675025
- cbmuser 6y agoI have been a long-time Amiga user (since the 90s) and never let go of the machine - like many others in the community (we even have regular conferences and meetings etc with new hardware being developed and released). I personally became the m68k maintainer in Debian because I was asked whether I would like to work on the port shortly after I became a Debian Developer and I agreed. I learned really a lot about kernel and software development in general that I stayed with it. It also helped me land a job with one of the big Linux companies.
- DCKing 6y agoI have a hardware question. Seeing that the heyday of the Motorola 68000 series was in the early nineties, aren't modern Debian's storage and memory requirements getting to be very prohibitive, even for a minimal headless install? I'm just curious what kind of hardware setups are used for running and developing Debian on these systems. What are you running on/developing with? Is a desktop computer with qemu the fastest practical 68k computer you can have?
- ido 6y agowasn't the heyday of the Motorola 68k the 80s? by the time the 486/040 came about it was already starting to show that motorola was not able to match intel's mhz push.
- DCKing 6y agoYes - I think "heyday" is the wrong word choice here. What I meant to say is that my impression is that the most powerful hardware with 68k CPUs came out in the early 90s, and outside of microcontrollers there hasn't been much development in 68k since. At least, that is my impression from googling around - the 68060 in Atari clones and late Amiga revisions around 1995 seem to be the end of the line for 68k.
- cbmuser 6y agoAs mentioned in another comment, you can get very fast m68k hardware with the Vampire accelerators these days which actually implement additional instructions and are therefore called 68080 by its developers.
- DCKing 6y agoAh very cool. It seems that Apollo 68080 is a 'virtual' 68k CPU running on an FPGA. I was curious about FPGAs since they currently have plenty of headroom to emulate early nineties consoles (inluding 68k based ones like the Genesis) - it's awesome to see that FPGAs can now be used for continued life of old CPU architectures.
- tyingq 6y agoIt is a little tricky for the older CPUs that want 5v I/O. There's not a universal bi-directional level shifter that works well in all common situations.
- jsymolon 6y agothe ColdFire SOCs (system on a chip) are still available and of newer "stock" vs chasing down original 68xxxx chips. I'm not too fond of emulators and like to work on actual hardware although the FPGA 68k cores are interesting.