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Linux on the Atari Jaguar

191 points by cakehonolulu

by cakehonolulu

2 subcomments

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

by nommuenjoyer

1 subcomments

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.

by rob74

3 subcomments

> 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...

by bni

3 subcomments

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?

by scrame

1 subcomments

Wow, i recognized the 68000 before i even saw the caption. That little chip sure powered a lot of different things back then.

by boznz

1 subcomments

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 :-)

by coupdejarnac

1 subcomments

Surely I must have seen someone do this already on Slashdot like 25 years ago. Cheers for using a recent kernel though, that's neat.

by LogicFailsMe

1 subcomments

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.

by jdswain

1 subcomments

It should be possible to build a custom cartridge to use some of that 8MB address space for RAM.

by basilikum

1 subcomments

How long does it take to boot?

by chiffre01

1 subcomments

Am I the only one who clicks on these kind of articles holding out hope to see the glimmer of Linux on an actual CRT from composit outputs?
But it's always just screen shots from an emulator...

by hogehoge51

1 subcomments

> The Motorola 68000
> 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!

by sportsracersss

1 subcomments

Very neat!

by superzero11

0 subcomment

[flagged]

by tangsoupgallery

0 subcomment

[flagged]