Subj : enigma on M68K linux
To   : vorlon
From : Oli
Date : Sat Jan 14 2023 01:50 am

vorlon wrote (2023-01-13):

 >> Would M68K fast performant enough to run a nodejs program?

 v> Dunno, that was one of the reasons to try... @-)

:)

 >> Just out of curiosity, can you explain the '-m32' problem? I thought
 >> it is a gcc parameter for compiling 32-bit on 64-bit systems (like old
 >> BBS software that would break on 64-bit). Is it used in nodejs or do
 >> you have to add it? Do you cross-compile?

 v> gcc (Debian 12.2.0-12) 12.2.0 was saying "Unknown option" or to that
 v> effect. It was last year when I tyied, and after so many of them showing
 v> up through the compiling process I gave up. (Ie: I'd remove that option
 v> and start again, only for another one to show up.)

 v> This was done with no cross-compile, directly on the machine.

I looked it up again and -m32 is mainly an option for amd64 and tells gcc to compile for x86 (32bit / i386 / i686). It's not valid for m68k (or arm or most other machines).

Today I partially franken-upgraded my old unsupported 32-bit Ubuntu 19.10 to Debian 11 (Bullseye). I was stuck on this version, because they dropped 32-bit support with 20.04 LTS and I couldn't upgrade anymore.

My original plan was to reinstall everything some day, but I read the debian-m68k mailing list archive today and looked into m68k emulation. I learned that Linux and qemu recently introduced a "virt" m68k machine, which does not emulate any real hardware, but provides virtio devices. ( https://www.phoronix.com/news/Virtual-m68k-Linux-5.19 )

As I was eager to test it, I had to upgrade the kernel and qemu ASAP. Now I'm running Linux a 6.0 64-bit kernel with a 32-bit userland and qemu 7.2. I have not tried qemu-m86k virt yet, but did a first test with qemu-user (qemu-m68k-static). I downloaded busybox-static from Debian's m68k repository and was able to run the busybox m68k binary on x86 successfully (it magically runs like any other program). It should be possible to install a m68k userland in a chroot environment and try to install nodejs and enigma there.

The performance of the emulated m68k binaries seems to be 4 to 6 times slower than native x86, which is not that bad and should be fast enough for BBSing. It is also a simple setup for compiling and testing portability. Not as much fun as running everything on real retro hardware (e.g. Amiga) though.


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