This is a deep dive on what is necessary to get Linux on the 68000-based Atari Jaguar. No specialized hardware/flash carts. All runs within the original hardware vision (2 megabytes of RAM) and gets to a Busybox shell. Linux repository with the changes: https://github.com/cakehonolulu/linux_jag
On of the few things where getting Doom to run on it wouldn’t be that cool. But I love the post, except for the part where you reminded me I was old by acting like no one remembers that thing.
Still occasionally bring out my old jaguar for Alien vs Predator to try and remember what the excitement was all about, but as to putting Linux on it, amazing effort, but I think I'm going to pass :-)
The pro move would be getting the Jaguar development tools with their assemblers for the GPU (yes, the Jaguar had a GPU) and the DSP up and running. With just the 68000 it's kind of a glorified Atari ST as a console.
> Overall, it got lots of traction commercially; it ....
Before ARM the m68k was possibly the most deployed processor architecture in history. In the late 1990s it was in printers, cars, personal digital assistants, erc, as well as all the home computers, arcades and unix workstations it found it's way into in the 1980s and early 1990s.
It's sucessor, the Coldfire, could have taken ARMs place...
Probably this is the reason it's still in the Linux source tree!
> Biggest contenders are the original Macintosh (And Apple Lisa), the Commodore Amiga series of computers (With varying generations of the 68000), the Sega Genesis/Megadrive, the Neo-Geo AES, Plexus workstations... and the Jaguar.
Strange that they mention almost all well-known 68k machines, but forget the (extremely relevant in this case) Atari ST...
This is very cool. I thought literally no one else was using/interested in the 68000 support in the kernel. It was actually subtly broken for a long time. I think the fixes I did went in to 7.0 or 7.1..
I have some potential performance fixes for linuxmd like optimizing the multiplication that happens each time the kernel time infra needs to be updated. Would be cool to see if they help for you too and then get a "Tested-by" on the patch to mainline.
I think this is very impressive. I remember from eons ago people were running Linux on Amiga, but then it was the later models with 68040 processors with more RAM.
As far as I remember no one ran it on a 68000 with 2 megabytes of RAM.
Could Linux today run on an Amiga 500 with RAM expansion, in this same way?
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 40.6 ms ] thread> Overall, it got lots of traction commercially; it ....
Before ARM the m68k was possibly the most deployed processor architecture in history. In the late 1990s it was in printers, cars, personal digital assistants, erc, as well as all the home computers, arcades and unix workstations it found it's way into in the 1980s and early 1990s.
It's sucessor, the Coldfire, could have taken ARMs place...
Probably this is the reason it's still in the Linux source tree!
But it's always just screen shots from an emulator...
Strange that they mention almost all well-known 68k machines, but forget the (extremely relevant in this case) Atari ST...
I have some potential performance fixes for linuxmd like optimizing the multiplication that happens each time the kernel time infra needs to be updated. Would be cool to see if they help for you too and then get a "Tested-by" on the patch to mainline.
As far as I remember no one ran it on a 68000 with 2 megabytes of RAM.
Could Linux today run on an Amiga 500 with RAM expansion, in this same way?