I was talking with a few people about what it takes to get it so that somebody other than the very small team of m68k can perform basic testing themselves of packages, even if it is in a non-authoriative manner using an emulator. But the current #1 show-stopper for this is the absence of usable boot isos to even *begin* working on this in earnest. This is so far the "best" looking way for people to do this: https://web.archive.org/web/20131028070137/http://dev.gentoo.org/~armin76/m68k/aranym.xml And well, none of that is great. Without usable boot media, its incredibly hard to expect somebody outside the core set have the vaguest clue how to get it working. If there are usable boot images *somewhere*, its certainly not clear from: - https://www.gentoo.org/downloads/ - https://gentoo.ussg.indiana.edu//experimental/m68k/ - https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/M68k - https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:M68k If there are any. And having this seems to be something that would be more important than whether or not I keep m68k keywords supported. I am motivated to keep m68k keywords working, but with the realities of bus factor and no real "bootstrap" method that can really be used, this is getting increasingly difficult. Doing cross-dev yourself as a user is predictably going to be harder than using a last-known-good ISO, even if that ISO is grossly out of date.
To the best of my knowledge, Gentoo has never published m68k boot media (ISO or disk images), even in experimental. vapier might be able to give you a definitive answer
I'm going to close this. Not because we don't care about m68k, I'm working on that right now, but because I don't think m68k boot media makes much sense. I told Kent so a few weeks after he filed this bug. Hardly any m68k hardware had a CD-ROM drive. The Commodore CDTV did but no way you'd run Linux on that. It's basically an Amiga 500 in a very heavy VCR-like case. I have one! The Amiga CD32 also did but it has no MMU. That basically leaves other Amigas but none of them had CD-ROM as standard. I don't even know if the bus it uses would work with Linux. And beyond the Amiga? It seems to be a similar story with the Atari. You almost certainly couldn't have an image that supports both. Maybe it's more feasible on the Mac side but I have no idea. The Amiga 600 and 1200 have regular IDE hard drives. It's not that hard to partition the disk on the Amiga before formatting and unpacking the (upcoming) stage3 on a PC. The Linux kernel can even read Amiga partition tables. I usually boot mine over NFS instead. To actually boot the kernel, it's more common to launch it from AmigaOS using amiboot. There is a port of LILO that can boot directly into Linux but I wouldn't recommend it. QEMU and ARAnyM are also very practical options for provisioning m68k systems now. I have a kernel image that boots on both those, FS-UAE, and my real Amiga. RIP Kent!
