Hobbyists continue to tinker around with the Motorola 68000 "m68k" support within the Linux kernel and even landing a fix now in 2025 for the vintage Macintosh II.

Merged overnight were the few changes to the Motorola m68k code in the Linux kernel. Noted in [1]the merge :

- One more strscpy() conversion

- Fix detection of real Mac II

- defconfig updates

Not particularly exciting but to see fixed detection of real Macintosh II hardware in 2025 for Linux 6.16 was fascinating.

The issue at hand with the Mac II detection was spotted by a user booting the Linux kernel on an actual Mac II system and noting:

"Detected Macintosh model: 6

Apple Macintosh Unknown"

The detection to become an "unknown" Apple Macintosh had broke due to an off-by-one error in the code. So a small little fix was needed to restore proper Macintosh II detection in the Linux kernel.

The patch noted this issue had been around since the Linux 2.6.12-rc2 kernel, which released in June 2005. Now at least the issue is fixed for Linux 6.16 and will be potentially back-ported to existing Linux kernel series should you be interested in proper detection for the over three decade old Macintosh II systems.



[1] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=c35328632ed89efeb616603e7fa151ac730fafe4