Hello everyone, The Commodore Amiga world had been having quite a lot of movement lately. A hardware/software developer team called "Apollo Team"[1] have successfully developed using FPGA a new version of the m68k family (they call it Apollo Core 68080) that is compatible with 68k but about 4 times faster than 68060 at 80 MHz [2].
The project has been delivered to users with the new Apollo Accelerators [3] for Amiga 600 and 500. I'm the happy owner of one for the Amiga 600 and it converts this tiny Amiga in a total monster, with no compatibility problems showed so far. The project is no longer targeted only at Amiga, but it looks like Atari ST is going to benefit also from it and potentially any m68k based architecture. To the point now: I would love to try Debian GNU/Linux m68k in my new super-charged Amiga 600, BUT the Apollo Core lacks m68k compatible MMU and it is not in the roadmap of the team to implement that as it was never necessary in Amiga OS (no memory protection, you know...). I know MMU is a hard requirement for running Linux kernel, but there was a project that enabled Linux kernel to run on MMU-less CPUs called uClinux [4]. If I'm correct this kernel has been incorporated into the mainstream vanilla Linux and you can compile it without MMU support (config MMU set to no). It looks, however, that not many programs will run with that kernel... Question: any chance Debian port for m68k could run with such a kernel? [1] http://www.apollo-core.com/index.htm [2] http://www.apollo-core.com/index.htm?page=performance [3] http://www.apollo-accelerators.com/ [4] http://www.uclinux.org/ Carlos Milán Figueredo HispaMSX System Operator http://www.hispamsx.org / telnet://bbs.hispamsx.org
