Comment by cjd8
10 hours ago
>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.
There have been variants of the kernel around for some time that can run on microcontrollers without an MMU (mainly uCLinux).
m68knommu was merged into the mainline kernel in version 2.5.46: https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.5/ChangeLog-2.5.4...
Of course the 2.5 line was the unstable pre-release for the 2.6 kernel. That means that stable mainline linux has had nommu since 2.6.0, which was released 17 December 2003.
So yes, some time indeed.