Developers Try Again To Upstream Motorola 68000 Series Support In LLVM

[Dedale]

I love this thread. Pleasant to read.

[kcrudup]

x86 architecture was not better than m68k.

Seriously. The 68K had an orthogonal instruction set, linear memory and I/O mapping, the list goes on and on. We'd have a far better world even today had Moto been able to make the 68K in decent quantity and price when Boca Raton came calling.

(ETA: ... and how could I forget "*DACK"! Made IO implementations so much easier to wire up)

[rox77]

>Don't forget the "new" 68080 made with an fpga for the new amiga vampire v4 in 2019 ^_^
interesting if they are planning to add mmu support, seems there was linux port for m68k

[spirit]

Yep. The final CPU in the m68k series was the 68060 released in the mid-90s. By then, Apple had already decided to switch to the PowerPC line of CPUs.

Don't forget the "new" 68080 made with an fpga for the new amiga vampire v4 in 2019 ^_^

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbzi6Ma5pzI


Amiga will never die !

[L_A_G]

...

Ok... So somebody made a basic OS in their spare time that'll run on a Z80? Is that supposed to be impressive? Gary Kildall created the first version of CP/M for the Intel 8080 way back in 1973 and the Z80 is a heavily upgraded derivative of it.

[onicsis]

Sure, some of the older Roombas and other "higher-power" embedded applications may have used them years and years ago, but those applications have long since moved almost exclusively to ARM-based SoCs. The 68k series now only really exists in the same very low power space as the Z80 and 6502.

https://www.borntoengineer.com/z80-collapse-os-post-apocalyptic
https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/1...ost-apocalypse

[L_A_G]

Not sure why you think a comparison between the MC68xxx and the Z80 / 6502 is even---remotely---a valid one.

Way to totally miss the point... I said that they're the same from the standpoint of what they're used for; Very low power embedded applications. The sort of applications where even most ARM cores are too advanced and power-hungry.

Sure, some of the older Roombas and other "higher-power" embedded applications may have used them years and years ago, but those applications have long since moved almost exclusively to ARM-based SoCs. The 68k series now only really exists in the same very low power space as the Z80 and 6502.

[bridgman]

Looks like the article has been updated and now reads very cleanly.

For a long time a Motorola 68010 or higher plus a paged MMU was pretty much the standard for Unix minicomputers and workstations. The 68010 brought recoverable page fault support plus a few other changes to support virtualization, and IIRC most of the changes after that focused on performance.

[danmcgrew]

Not sure if there's much of a point to this late into the twilight years of the Motorola 68k. Sure, derivatives are still being produced by NXP(who merged with Freescale, Motorola's semiconductor division after it was spun off, in 2015) for low power embedded applications, but so are Zilog Z80 and MOS 6502, yet you don't see mainline support for those anymore.

Not sure why you think a comparison between the MC68xxx and the Z80 / 6502 is even---remotely---a valid one.

Are you, at all, aware of the architectural---hardware---, and software---instruction-set and memory-referencing-capability---differences between the ONE, and the other two which are not even in the same league?

I will not say anything about the comparison of apples to oranges. Promise.

[edwaleni]

The last Motorola 68k I worked with was the original Cisco routers. The MGS, AGS and AGS+ all ran the Motorola CPU's. I asked the engineers why the Motorola? They were all Apple fans and thought that was the best place to start. Those were the days replacing CPU boards before flash came along. It was like working with a Heathkit. Setting jumpers before inserting the board into the backplane.