Hi!
I'm happy to announce that we are finally able to provide a
porterbox for the
m68k architecture which is available to every Debian Developer
and everyone
with a Debian guest account with the necessary permissions.
The machine is called mitchy [1] (FQDN: mitchy.debian.net) and
is named after
the dog Mitchy of the creator of the Amiga, Jay Miner [2].
The machine is based on a new QEMU m68k virtual machine type
based on Google's
Goldfish project [3] and supports up to 3.2 GB of RAM and up to
128 virtual
devices. With the host server currently in use, the emulated
68040 is clocked
at around 1 GHz which is enough to build and test most packages
- although for
building larger projects like GCC, it's advisable to use a
faster host machine
or QEMU user emulation.
Hosting is kindly provided by Gandi.net [4] who have been
providing cloud resources
for Debian Ports to provide build machines for multiple
architectures for a while
now.
The code has been developed by Laurent Vivier and consists of
changes to both
QEMU [5] and the Linux [6] which have not been upstreamed
yet. Laurent will
be giving a talk on the current status of this project and m68k
emulation in
QEMU in general during our next m68k online meeting on November,
6th [7] where
everyone is invited to join.
Since the Goldfish-based m68k emulation support is rather new,
the new porterbox
may sometimes becomes unstable although that has improved a lot
with the latest
kernel patches by Laurent. There are also still some limitations
in the FPU
emulation support, so if you are seeing unexpected build
failures or run into
any other problems with the virtual machine, please let me
know. I do have real
m68k hardware available (which is much slower) to be able to run
occasional tests
on it.
Thanks,
Adrian
[1] https://db.debian.org/machines.cgi?host=mitchy
[2]
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/07/a-history-of-the-amiga-part-1/3/
[3] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMwNjM
[4] https://www.gandi.net
[5] https://github.com/vivier/qemu-m68k/tree/m68k-virt
[6] https://github.com/vivier/linux/tree/m68k-virt
[7] http://m68k.info/