Re: [PATCH] mm: nommu: point to the write iterator upon split_vma

[Daniel Palmer]

Hi Matthew,

On Mon, 6 Jul 2026 at 12:58, Matthew Wilcox <willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Should we delete support for NOMMU?  As you say, it doesn't get much
> testing, or presumably usage.  I have this quote from #m68k a couple of
> years ago...
>
> : I looked at nommu very briefly when I had my 68000 board on the bench
> : but didn’t get anywhere. Also didn’t try particularly hard. I think
> : you are better off with fuzix or OS9 if you want something unixy.

There are a few of us using the 68000* port for hobby projects. After
hackernews saw that I got it running on a sega megadrive I got some
emails from people that are running a really old nommu arm fork on an
old mobile phone and are considering moving to mainline. I think there
are people using it in real world important stuff on riscv and superh.

I'm not demanding to keep it around for a few weird projects no one
cares about just saying we do exist. :)
I think most of us don't/won't notice mm stuff until something breaks our thing.
I have asked the ones I know about to at least send the patches they
have so people know there are users.

> (i suspect Zephyr would also be good, but it doesn't support m68k, just
> arc, arm, arm64, mips, openrisc, renesas rx, riscv, sparc, x86 and xtensa)

I think someone suggested this before but zephyr is really not as nice
as Linux to work with.
I have almost mainline linux, almost mainline u-boot etc running on
68000 with networking etc. It's even using devicetree.
I've been working on patches for nolibc for half a year so that it's
possible to create ELFs that run on mmu or nommu m68k instead of
porting something linux nuttx because the linux experience is just
better.

Thanks,

Daniel