4 ms·

I 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 requirement

by DCKing 6y ago

I 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 ago
wasn'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 ago
  Yes - 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 ago
    As 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 ago
      Ah 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 ago
        It 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 ago
    the 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.
- mschaef 6y ago
  > wasn't the heyday of the Motorola 68k the 80s? It depends on the market. For PC/workstation class machines, the 80's into the early 90's were 68k's moment in the sun. But I distinctly remember doing new embedded development work on 68K in the late 90's and and Palm Pilot (1997) had a 68K core also. So even though they had to retreat from one market, they stayed active in the embedded space. (Of course, so did Intel... that same project with the 68K also ran on an 80188EB, 386SX, and an AMD Elan SC400). > 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. Intel had a few more minor growing pains too. The 486/25 and /33 chips were easily accepted into the market, but the /50 was not. There were problems at the time getting a 50MHz motherboard to work correctly and not cause too many problems with radio interference. So the 50MHz part wound up being limited to the high end of the market. The step beyond 33 for the 'mainstream' PC market was the DX2/66, which left the bus/motherboard at 33MHz and used the on-chip cache to run the CPU itself at 66. So faster CPU than a DX/50, but less bus bandwidth, which turned out to be a reasonable tradeoff. (Particularly given that I/O was often very slow, anyway, being forced through a 16-bit 8Mhz AT bus.) The Pentium, of course, brought the >=60Mhz motherboard back into the PC mainstream, and there was also a 486/DX4 part around the Pentium timeframe. Contrary to its name, the DX4 was a clock tripled CPU that would run 33/100 (with an option for a doubled 50/100 as well). Clock multipliers came to the Pentium with the second revision... the original P5/60 and /66 ran 1:1, but the subsequent P5/90 and /100 ran 1.5:1.
  - tyingq 6y ago
    VME bus 680x0 servers were in pretty wide use in the appliance market through the 90's as well. Things like firewalls.
    - mschaef 6y ago
      > wide use in the appliance market through the 90's as well. Things like firewalls. Thank you for clarifying with that bit... I was (very briefly) trying to imagine how a 90's era dishwasher or something might use a 68K CPU in a VME cage.
      - 6y ago
- cptskippy 6y ago
  The Assembly class I took ~1999-2000 was writing 68K assembly using the Tesside 68000 simulator.
cbmuser 6y ago
I have in fact an Amiga 4000/060 running Debian unstable as of now. There are new hardware accelerators being developed such as the Vampire which will provide a faster basis for running Linux on Amiga/m68k: > https://www.apollo-accelerators.com/ https://www.apollo-accelerators.com/ Currently, I'm using mainly QEMU for development. QEMU's m68k emulation has received tons of improvements thanks to the heavy use of the Debian/m68k project. In fact, all the package builders for m68k are currently QEMU-based and building the whole Debian archive on QEMU has been proven to be the best quality testing of QEMU ;-).
- mschaef 6y ago
  > There are new hardware accelerators being developed such as the Vampire which will provide a faster basis for running Linux on Amiga/m68k: That's very impressive... I'd known people had been doing Amiga accelerators for a while, but not that sophisticated. Also very cool that they use a custom Amiga style mouse pointer on the website. (Viewed the site on an OSX machine and I'll admit to the double take I did...)
- jerf 6y ago
  Tone: Honest inquiry. What do you get out of running Linux on an m68k accelerator? (I don't know what the answer is, but I'm happy to hear it and have no intention of arguing about it.) (I understand wanting to run the original Amiga OS on faster gear.)

by DCKing 6y ago

ido 6y ago

wasn'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 ago
Yes - 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 ago
  As 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 ago
    Ah 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 ago
      It 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 ago
  the 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.
mschaef 6y ago
> wasn't the heyday of the Motorola 68k the 80s? It depends on the market. For PC/workstation class machines, the 80's into the early 90's were 68k's moment in the sun. But I distinctly remember doing new embedded development work on 68K in the late 90's and and Palm Pilot (1997) had a 68K core also. So even though they had to retreat from one market, they stayed active in the embedded space. (Of course, so did Intel... that same project with the 68K also ran on an 80188EB, 386SX, and an AMD Elan SC400). > 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. Intel had a few more minor growing pains too. The 486/25 and /33 chips were easily accepted into the market, but the /50 was not. There were problems at the time getting a 50MHz motherboard to work correctly and not cause too many problems with radio interference. So the 50MHz part wound up being limited to the high end of the market. The step beyond 33 for the 'mainstream' PC market was the DX2/66, which left the bus/motherboard at 33MHz and used the on-chip cache to run the CPU itself at 66. So faster CPU than a DX/50, but less bus bandwidth, which turned out to be a reasonable tradeoff. (Particularly given that I/O was often very slow, anyway, being forced through a 16-bit 8Mhz AT bus.) The Pentium, of course, brought the >=60Mhz motherboard back into the PC mainstream, and there was also a 486/DX4 part around the Pentium timeframe. Contrary to its name, the DX4 was a clock tripled CPU that would run 33/100 (with an option for a doubled 50/100 as well). Clock multipliers came to the Pentium with the second revision... the original P5/60 and /66 ran 1:1, but the subsequent P5/90 and /100 ran 1.5:1.
- tyingq 6y ago
  VME bus 680x0 servers were in pretty wide use in the appliance market through the 90's as well. Things like firewalls.
  - mschaef 6y ago
    > wide use in the appliance market through the 90's as well. Things like firewalls. Thank you for clarifying with that bit... I was (very briefly) trying to imagine how a 90's era dishwasher or something might use a 68K CPU in a VME cage.
    - 6y ago
cptskippy 6y ago
The Assembly class I took ~1999-2000 was writing 68K assembly using the Tesside 68000 simulator.

cbmuser 6y ago

I have in fact an Amiga 4000/060 running Debian unstable as of now. There are new hardware accelerators being developed such as the Vampire which will provide a faster basis for running Linux on Amiga/m68k: > https://www.apollo-accelerators.com/ https://www.apollo-accelerators.com/ Currently, I'm using mainly QEMU for development. QEMU's m68k emulation has received tons of improvements thanks to the heavy use of the Debian/m68k project. In fact, all the package builders for m68k are currently QEMU-based and building the whole Debian archive on QEMU has been proven to be the best quality testing of QEMU ;-).

mschaef 6y ago
> There are new hardware accelerators being developed such as the Vampire which will provide a faster basis for running Linux on Amiga/m68k: That's very impressive... I'd known people had been doing Amiga accelerators for a while, but not that sophisticated. Also very cool that they use a custom Amiga style mouse pointer on the website. (Viewed the site on an OSX machine and I'll admit to the double take I did...)
jerf 6y ago
Tone: Honest inquiry. What do you get out of running Linux on an m68k accelerator? (I don't know what the answer is, but I'm happy to hear it and have no intention of arguing about it.) (I understand wanting to run the original Amiga OS on faster gear.)