m68k
The contents of this article reflect the status in FPC SVN trunk. Some features listed here might not be available in the latest stable version.
Introduction
Historically, the Motorola 680x0 (abbreviated as "m68k") port was the first Free Pascal port to CPU architectures other than i386. During the big refactoring for FPC 2.0, the code left without maintenance and the support broke and was partly removed. The Motorola 680x0 code generator got revived more than 10 years later, before FPC 3.0. It still shares some components with the old 1.x source code, like parts of the inline assembler reader, but most of the code is new.
Supported CPU types
The current Motorola 680x0 backend supports the following CPU and FPU types:
- Motorola 68000 (including code generation for unaligned accesses)
- Motorola 68020-68040
- Motorola 68881 FPU and compatibles (optional)
- ColdFire ISA A to ISA C
- ColdFire v4e FPU (optional)
Notes:
- FPU support is optional, the code generator also supports using the RTL's SoftFPU.
- Most of the ColdFire support was never tested on a real hardware, only in QEMU
Supported Targets
Free Pascal currently supports the following operating systems as target platforms on m68k:
Support is planned for the following targets:
Performance
Most members of the old Motorola 680x0 CPU family are not fast enough to run the compiler natively, although high-end 68060 systems and various fast JIT-based m68k emulators with enough memory are capable to do so. Therefore it is recommended to use a cross-compiler when targeting most m68k systems. Apart from the performance issues the code generator is mature enough to compile the compiler itself, make cycle works. Only Amiga and Linux are supported as compilation hosts.
