Developers Try Again To Upstream Motorola 68000 Series Support In LLVM

[Mario Junior]

For the fuc**** what purpose?

[tildearrow]

Typos:

Hobbyist developers are trying once again to get a Motorola 6800 back-end merged into the upstream LLVM compiler. Yes, the M68k processors that are some 30+ years old.

The Motorola 6800 series 8-bit processors have been around since the mid-70's and gaining popularity through the 80's thanks to the likes of the early Apple Macintosh computers. Fast forward to 2020, the Motorola 6800 is still a popular target for vintage computer enthusiasts and hobbyists. Community developers have worked on improving the Linux kernel support for M68k hardware like early Apple Powerbooks as recently as a few years ago and the compiler support is a continued target.

GCC 11 due out next year was looking to drop the M68k target over its unmaintained status. Hobbyists though stepped up there so the M68k support will remain in GCC. Now developers are also looking at adding M68k support to the LLVM compiler.

This isn't the first time that M68k support for LLVM has been brought up albeit never successfully landed to date. Building off the past failures to get the Motorola 6800 series support upstreamed, developers last week sent out new patches proposing this back-end -- this time they are showing more clarity about the developers involved and being committed to supporting the code, the sustainability of the code, and responding quickly to code review comments.

This patch series is the latest attempt at upstreaming Motorola 6800 series support in LLVM. Besides all the back-end specific code there is also some common LLVM code changes that fall under greater scrutiny.

We'll see how this attempt pans out over the weeks ahead if LLVM could finally see a mainline Motorola 6800 series back-end in 2020/2021.

Do you mean 68000 .-.

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Developers Try Again To Upstream Motorola 6800 Series Support In LLVM

Hobbyist developers are trying once again to get a Motorola 6800 back-end merged into the upstream LLVM compiler. Yes, the M68k processors that are some 30+ years old...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LLVM-Motorola-6800-Series-2020