Wii Linux

Linux runs on the Nintendo Wii, albeit not as well as NetBSD, because some features are missing. To get an interactive console with a good chance of working, I recommend using a USB Gecko, which is an adapter that effectively adds a serial port to the EXI bus. Patches are needed to use it.

In order to boot Linux, you first need to install BootMii on your Wii, and prepare a SD card with mini's armboot.bin in the bootmii subdirectory. Note that not all SD cards will work. Then compile Linux for the Wii, and copy arch/powerpc/boot/dtbImage.wii to the SD card as bootmii/ppcboot.elf. Note also that your kernel should not be to big. Try to keep it below 8 MiB.

Mainline Linux support

Feature	Status	(to be) merged in	Other comments
PPC32 ioremap rework	merged	4.17-rc1	Replaces the old ioremap hack.
GPIO driver	patchset v3 merged	4.17-rc1	Requires discontigmem or resource.c hack
GPIO driver irq support	TBD	5.0-rc1?
GPIO LED (in drive slot)	merged	4.17-rc1	Requires GPIO driver
GPIO buttons (power,...)	almost ready for submission	5.0-rc1?	Requires GPIO interrupt support
audio driver (DSP+AI)	TBD	??
video driver (VI)	TBD	??	fbdev or DRM? Where/when to convert color space?
I2C/AVE	TBD	??	depends on GPIO; requires some debugging
SDHCI driver	works	long ago	interrupt-related brokenness is fixed
Wifi	fails to connect	??	depends on SDHCI
SD card	works	done	depends on SDHCI
NAND flash	TBD	??	perhaps not very useful...
USB	TBD	??
Bluetooth	TBD	??	depends on USB
EXI	TBD	??	it's a whole new subsystem
EXI via SPI	TBD	??	EXI for systems that shouldn't have it
Memory Card	TBD	??	depends on EXI
RTC MFD	TBD	??	depends on EXI
USBGecko driver	TBD	??	arguably the most useful driver on top of EXI
SHA1/AES acceleration	TBD	??	not sure if it's actually faster than PPC code...
Disk drive support	TBD	??
Wii U support	TBD	??	another group has done some work
kexec	untested	--	it should work, but who knows?
KVM	untested	--	it, too, should work