https://hackaday.com/2026/06/29/its-linux-on-a-sega-megadriv...

I have such fond memories of my time back in the day owning a MegaDrive. It wasn't my first or last games console, but it was my formative one. It was a time in my life when I was into video games (Sonic 2 being the only game I ever played to completion). It pleases me to realise there's still a community around the MegaDrive and - as others has said - this is so crazy but wonderful to see!

Very cool to see, so pointless it just had to be done.

I was wondering how it was squeezed into 64KB of RAM but it uses the 4MB on the Everdrive cart. With that it makes sense, considering Linux can run on an N64 with 4MB of RAM.

Genesis does what Nintendon't.

> The lowly 68000 in the Sega doesn’t have a memory management unit required for the full Linux experience, so what’s really running here is a kernel compiled with the -nommu option.

Huh... I thought Linux actually required MMUs. I was under the impression it'd never run on these old consoles because of that. Learned something new today.

> A QEMU fork that emulates enough of the MegaDrive and the EverDrive to play with this without the real hardware is included.

That's seriously impressive.

Absolutely nuts and squirrels.

Then again, I did know that the Mega Drive's CPU loadout (68000 and Z80) is the same as the first Unix machine I ever used (a TRS-80 Model 16), so running some form of Unix on it was therefore, theoretically, possible...

It runs Doom, now it runs Linux

If this runs on a megadrive (Genesis), would this also boot on a Sega Nomad, the portable version of a genesis?

Original title: It’s Linux, On A Sega Megadrive