5 ms·

For historical record, first m68k which could use mmu was m68010 I've never seen m68008 m68010 and m68012 in action though. Seems Sun used them.

• UncleSlacky 5y ago
  The Sinclair QL used the 68008.
• kabdib 5y ago
  The vanilla 68000 can definitely use an MMU. I think you're conflating "can handle a general fault" and "does address translation". Some PDP-11s ran Unix just fine with MMUs that didn't generate page faults (they just did address translation and bounds checking). You can even do fault handling on the 68000 if you're willing to limit it to instructions that are known to work or that you can throw away (e.g., XOR, which is what Sun used for its stack probes). I designed an MMU for the 68000-based Atari ST (it did translation and bounds checking in an interesting way), and we implemented it in the silicon. A Unix for it never happened, unfortunately. https://dadhacker-125488.ingress-alpha.easywp.com/how-the-atari-st-almost-had-real-unix/ https://dadhacker-125488.ingress-alpha.easywp.com/how-the-at...
  • jagrsw 5y ago
    Thanks for the correction. Your project is very interesting. I think that my mistake was caused by this, that some manual I read in old days was claiming that m68010 was the first one which was able to run proper unix OSes, because it had correctly implemented privilege levels. And I somehow conflated it with MMU.
  • gunapologist99 5y ago
    That's a really interesting bit of history -- thanks for writing it all down and sharing!
    • deleted 5y ago
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