I have a large affection for my 38MHz 68040 based Macintosh Quadra 650. Right now it is running NetBSD v1.3, and cracking RC5DES keys at 32 kkeys/sec. NetBSD also includes many facilities for firewalling and proxying. It is my apartments' dial-up server.But, just for comparison, my PowerMac G3 266MHz does 870 kkeys/sec and my work PowerMac G3 300Mhz which does 980 kkeys/sec with the rc5des client from www.distributed.net. Go ahead you Intel lovers, tell me that the PowerPC 750 does not rule in the area of raw processing power.
Anyways, the point for this page was to describe my involvment in making the 68k platform more robust by providing a lower level kernel which would protect the chip from machine check interrupts, spurious interrupts, and double-bus faults. The nickname for this pet project of mine is Titanium, and would be designed in a generic way enough that plugin support for other architectures would be possible, such as PowerPC. Basically, it is being made with the intention of providing a Hardware Abstraction Layer of high enough quality that can be retrofitted onto any microprocessor, without losing any features that the chip can still provide.
I have put in some effort to play with and help port linux-mac68k and maclinux-68k to MacOS, but nothing that was ever merged into distribution.
I guess the reason why I am stuck on NetBSD right now is the fact that MacOS X Server will be based on BSD v1.4 and NetBSD is also.