Notices by Steve Troughton-Smith (stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social)

Linus Torvalds: "And no, that's not the position of the Linux kernel.

I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer.

Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it.

Or just walk away."

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/07/linux-creator-linus-torvalds-puts-foot-down-on-anti-ai-comments/

@mikecane @WarnerCrocker @doctorlaura exhibit B: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/sk-hynix-says-2027-will-be-the-worst-year-for-memory-shortage-forecasts-crunch-to-last-until-2030-ceo-shares-grim-outlook-on-the-day-sk-hynix-gets-listed-on-nasdaq

'What are you blowing all your Codex tokens on anyway?'

Just having a bit of fun 🤷♂️

Who needs a MiSTer?

Since there's still a couple hours until my limit resets, had nothing better to do than to set up some actual hardware to run on. My original Pi 2B has a serial cable, so it seems like the right place to try

When I first got my original Raspberry Pi, I wondered why nobody ever made a bare-metal m68k emulator so it could boot directly into Macintosh. It's still not something I've seen anybody do, over a decade later.

So I set Codex some homework; no dependencies, no referencing existing code (but it is allowed peek at the annotated Mac ROM disassemblies that are out there). It set up a working cross compilation environment that can build for qemu and real hardware, and is making progress

😄

If this goes anywhere, I want to hook it up to an LCD panel in a 3D-printed enclosure. What I'd like to see is some form of device passthrough, to let it read from real floppy drives, use real ADB keyboard/mouse (I do have a USB dongle). I just think it would be neat to have a kernel you can just load onto any Raspberry Pi to get a retro Macintosh

And booted to desktop on real hardware (Raspberry Pi 1 Model B) 😎

Well how about that, we've (almost) booted to desktop

Keyboard and mouse via uart, I can finally click around the OS now

Verified that the kernel boots on a Pi Zero, and that it can boot from multiple different contemporary boot disks. The next big task will be to give it some kind of keyboard and mouse support. The mere fact that I can boot a $5 Pi Zero to the Macintosh desktop — with no Linux or 'OS' — tickles me

Misc screenshots from this Raspberry Pi Macintosh kernel, which now runs at 1X speed at 60fps (in qemu, not on real hardware yet) and supports qemu's usb sound device (as well as keyboard and mouse), and running multiple different versions of the Macintosh System

Mouse and keyboard now hooked up to USB input in qemu 👌

Macintosh Guided Tour, qemu-system-arm

Case in point: Mini vMac halts with a system error during this Macintosh Guided Tour disk. My emulator fixes the underlying SysError, so I can continue into the rest of the tour. If I only had vMac to work with, I would be none the wiser

For decades I, like all of you, have used many a Mac emulator that will error out in weird situations with unimplemented traps or the like, and have no recourse. 'Oh that just doesn't work in <SheepShaver>', etc. So it's pretty refreshing, while working on this one, to be able to ask Codex to add all the debug information I need to actually dig in and *fix* these things. And it will happily disassemble the apps triggering the crash to validate the fix against the assembly code

I might never have seen this 'Amazing' game. Or the 'Training' menu in Finder 👀

Internal and External floppy support & MacPaint

This emulator work has also highlighted that the archives of the original Macintosh system disks on the internet aren't pristine, and not everything functions out of the box like it should ☹️

To be expected, of course, but it's a shame there are no 'original' copies preserved

Backup Disk 690-5023-A
Guided Tour 690-5002-C
System Disk 690-5003-C
Write/Paint Tour 690-5006-C

https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1762-mac-system-1-x