Birbla

Discussion summary

A discussion about running Linux on the Atari Jaguar, including boot times and hardware modifications. Participants mention the Motorola 68000's historical significance and potential custom cartridge solutions.

What the discussion says

  • Linux on Jaguar takes about 90 seconds to boot.
  • Some users are interested in hardware mods like custom cartridges.
  • There is curiosity about Linux on CRT displays versus emulators.
  • The Motorola 68000 was historically widely used before ARM.
“It takes about a minute and a half to boot Linux on Jaguar.”
— cakehonolulu
“The Motorola 68000 was possibly the most deployed processor architecture before ARM.”
— hogehoge51

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  • The pro move would be getting the Jaguar development tools with their assemblers for the GPU (yes, the Jaguar had a GPU) and the DSP up and running. With just the 68000 it's kind of a glorified Atari ST as a console.
    by LogicFailsMe
  • Surely I must have seen someone do this already on Slashdot like 25 years ago. Cheers for using a recent kernel though, that's neat.
    by coupdejarnac
  • Still occasionally bring out my old jaguar for Alien vs Predator to try and remember what the excitement was all about, but as to putting Linux on it, amazing effort, but I think I'm going to pass :-)
    by boznz
  • Wow, i recognized the 68000 before i even saw the caption. That little chip sure powered a lot of different things back then.
    by scrame
  • I think this is very impressive. I remember from eons ago people were running Linux on Amiga, but then it was the later models with 68040 processors with more RAM.

    As far as I remember no one ran it on a 68000 with 2 megabytes of RAM.

    Could Linux today run on an Amiga 500 with RAM expansion, in this same way?

    by bni
  • > Biggest contenders are the original Macintosh (And Apple Lisa), the Commodore Amiga series of computers (With varying generations of the 68000), the Sega Genesis/Megadrive, the Neo-Geo AES, Plexus workstations... and the Jaguar.

    Strange that they mention almost all well-known 68k machines, but forget the (extremely relevant in this case) Atari ST...

    by rob74
  • This is very cool. I thought literally no one else was using/interested in the 68000 support in the kernel. It was actually subtly broken for a long time. I think the fixes I did went in to 7.0 or 7.1..

    I have some potential performance fixes for linuxmd like optimizing the multiplication that happens each time the kernel time infra needs to be updated. Would be cool to see if they help for you too and then get a "Tested-by" on the patch to mainline.

    by nommuenjoyer
  • This is a deep dive on what is necessary to get Linux on the 68000-based Atari Jaguar. No specialized hardware/flash carts. All runs within the original hardware vision (2 megabytes of RAM) and gets to a Busybox shell. Linux repository with the changes: https://github.com/cakehonolulu/linux_jag
    by cakehonolulu

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