Linux, Outside the (x86) Box
By Peter Seebach2005-06-29
Early days
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Linus himself originally thought portability was a non-issue. In fact, he dismissed it as academic and potentially harmful to performance, so the early Linux kernel was designed entirely without consideration for other architectures or possible porting. Some originally thought this would doom Linux to being a single-architecture system, its life and death inextricably tied to the Intel architecture.
Others saw it as a challenge.
The first porting work targeted Motorola 680x0 chips, specifically the Commodore Amiga. The Amiga has always had a number of UNIX® enthusiasts and was also one of the first targets for NetBSD, not to mention having an official port of SVR4 UNIX. This porting effort was quickly extended to cover the Atari ST series computers, although only systems with an MMU were supported.
Early on, non-x86 Linux ports were maintained as separate source trees, integrating patches from the main kernel tree or porting changes back to it. The majority of the Linux/m68k ports were integrated into the main Linux kernel in version 1.3.94. Today, new work tends to get into the main tree faster. Portability is now seen as a serious concern, and developers don't want to spend a lot of time tracking each others' patches back and forth.
The first couple of ports were a learning experience for everyone involved. Operating system portability across architectures was not something that most programmers had much experience with in 1991.
The early ports of Linux to non-x86 hardware were essentially recreational. They were ports to systems that were generally a little older and slower than the commodity x86 hardware but which users liked for other reasons. (For instance, I still miss my Amiga keyboards.) The reason new hardware was targeted so much was because it was interesting; this carried as much or even more weight than any actual need to run Linux on it.
Whatever the reason, though, the possibility of running Linux on other systems, coupled with widespread buzz and interest in Linux, led to an interesting development in 1998.
Tutorial Pages:
» What is it about Linux that makes it so attractive for non-x86 platforms?
» Early days
» Big iron
» Hardware capabilities
» New life for old hardware
» Just playing around
» Resources
First published by IBM DeveloperWorks
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