Motorola 68k support

The Motorola 68k architecture, introduced in the late 1970s, was a 16/32-bit CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computing) processor family that became widely used in personal computers, workstations, and embedded systems throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. It was known for its clean, orthogonal instruction set and ease of programming, which made it popular among both hardware designers and software developers.

The architecture featured a large set of general-purpose and address registers, allowing flexible operand manipulation and addressing modes. Its instructions were variable in length and rich in functionality, enabling more complex operations per instruction compared to RISC architectures. This design contributed to more compact code and easier compiler development at the time.

Motorola’s 68k was notable for supporting both 16-bit and 32-bit operations, giving it a degree of forward compatibility and performance headroom. It served as the foundation for many systems, including the original Apple Macintosh, Atari ST, and Amiga computers. Over time, it evolved into more powerful variants, but eventually gave way to RISC-based alternatives as performance and power efficiency demands increased.

Despite being phased out in mainstream computing, the architecture persists in some embedded and industrial applications due to its simplicity and well-established toolchain.

According to the upstream Linux m68k page, the m68k kernel were once stable on the Amiga, Atari, many Apple Macintosh models, and several VMEbus single-board computers from BVM, Motorola and Tadpole. In addition, ports are underway (with varying levels of progress) to the HP 9000/300 series, the NeXT workstation (black hardware), the Q40 and Q60, and Sun 3 series workstations.