Re: m68k-queue

Finn Thain
2013-05-18T01:48:31Z

On Fri, 17 May 2013, Michael Schmitz wrote:

>
> It appears there has been testing on recent kernels and continued
> improvement of hardware support - what is the latest kernel version that
> you or others tested?

The most recent kernel that I tested was 3.2, with the patches I was
working on at the time. Those patches went into 3.3, but they aren't
important for 68040 machines.

Hardware support for most Quadras was stable for a couple of years prior
to 3.2. Please see http://mac.linux-m68k.org/status/

>
> I've lost track - does the current unstable/experimental debian-ports
> distribution boot and install on Macs?

I haven't tested Thorsten's current images. But if they work on '040
Aranym, I can see no reason why they wouldn't work on '040 Macs.
(Excepting those Macs with the buggy 68LC040 chip revision.)

I did boot Thorsten's work successfully on a PowerBook 540 a while back (I
used ATAoE because of SCSI issues but SONIC ethernet DMA is faster than
local disk controllers anyway). I forget whether it was a debootstrap or
chroot.

The CD-ROM images at people.debian.org/~smarenka didn't work last time I
tried.

> Shame there's no such thing as 060 accelerator for Macs, but with 040
> models it might be feasible.

The DMA support in the SONIC ethernet driver and the PDMA support in the
ESP SCSI driver help a lot. Given 256 MB of RAM, a Quadra 950 would be a
good option.

Finn