Linux 5.12 Set To See Support For The Nintendo 64

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux 5.12 Set To See Support For The Nintendo 64

It's taken nearly twenty five years but the mainline Linux kernel this year will be able to boot on the Nintendo 64 game console... It's looking like the Nintendo 64 support will be merged with the upcoming Linux 5.12 kernel...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.12-Nintendo-64-Pending

[-MacNuke-]

So useless... I love it. :-)

[kpedersen]

I think the only way to deploy Linux on this hardware is with awesome but "legally gray" tools such as https://krikzz.com/store/

Whilst I love these things, these vendors are so incredibly unreliable I could never commit myself to writing some very complex Linux kernel code just to get something working on hardware that I likely will no longer be able to replace once it breaks.

These thrill seekers must simply live in the *now* XD

[mifritscher]

You can upgrade ne N64 to a whooping 8 MB of RAM!

[agd5f]

It's neat to support this, but this does add a maintenance burden for anyone working on MIPS. I'm not sure it's worth the trade off considering there are probably only a handful of people that would actually use this and even then, it's probably more of a novelty than anything else. We are seeing a lot of other older little used platforms getting dropped to ease the maintenance burden; this platform seems like a prime candidate to get dropped in the near future. Not sure it's worth the effort.

[Mez']

Are you able to revert back to the original state after you tinker with this?

[schmidtbag]

It's neat to support this, but this does add a maintenance burden for anyone working on MIPS. I'm not sure it's worth the trade off considering there are probably only a handful of people that would actually use this and even then, it's probably more of a novelty than anything else. We are seeing a lot of other older little used platforms getting dropped to ease the maintenance burden; this platform seems like a prime candidate to get dropped in the near future. Not sure it's worth the effort.

That's a good point. Also, there have been platforms not much older that were actually meant to be used as normal computers which were removed from the kernel. Considering the tools you need to even run Linux on the N64, I don't see any benefit of upstreaming this.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the project itself - I think it's really cool and shows a lot of talent. I just don't think this should be in the mainline kernel.

[mifritscher]

It is a very minimal patch (223 lines) - and none not-N64 files (besides the KConfig/KBuild) has been touched. So the burden is non-existant....

[cl333r]

This is what open source masochism be like..

[AJenbo]

Now we just have to decide if M1 or N64 should be our next workstation.