News: 0001480315

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Kalray Updates Patches For Their Linux Kernel Port To The KV3-1 "Coolidge" SoC

([Hardware] 5 Hours Ago KVX Linux Kernel Port)


Way back at the start of 2023, French fabless semiconductor company Kalray posted [1]Linux kernel patches for a "KVX" Linux kernel port to get Linux up and running on their MPPA3-80 "Coolidge" DPU SoC with the KV3-1 CPU architecture. A year and a half later this work still is outside the Linux kernel but finally a third iteration of the KVX Linux kernel port has been posted for review.

The Kalray MPPA3-80 is part of their "Massively Parallel Processor Array" architecture and intended as a Data Processing Unit (DPU) designed for data analysis and a variety of other "intelligent systems" needs. The Kalray DPU is advertised as being able to accelerate AI analytics, line-rate encryption/decryption/hashing, smart load balancing, RAID6 erasure coding, Computer Vision (CV) acceleration, and endless other high performance data processing needs. Kalray has been working to get the Linux kernel support mainlined along with associated support into the GCC compiler and other open-source toolchain components as the "KVX" architecture.

The KV3-1 Coolidge SoC is described as having 4MB of on-chip SMEM, one dedicated safety/security core, 16 x "Processing Elements" KV3-1 cores, 16 co-processors, and two crypto accelerators. The SoC supports dual 100G Ethernet, eight PCIe Gen4 controllers, and other common connectivity options.

Before the Linux kernel port can be merged the KVX compiler support will first need to be accepted into upstream GCC. With the KVX v3 Linux kernel patches all of the code has been re-based against the upstream Linux 6.10 kernel state compared to v6.1 when the patches were last posted. There is also various code updates to address prior review comments, DeviceTree bindings for all drivers, dropping legacy syscall support, and a variety of other code improvements.

Those interested in the upstream Kalray KVX Linux kernel porting effort can see the [2]v3 RFC patches for more details on this new CPU architecture enablement.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Kalray-KVX-Linux-Port

[2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240722094226.21602-1-ysionneau@kalrayinc.com/


phoronix

Oxygen is a very toxic gas and an extreme fire hazard. It is fatal in
concentrations of as little as 0.000001 p.p.m. Humans exposed to the
oxygen concentrations die within a few minutes. Symptoms resemble very
much those of cyanide poisoning (blue face, etc.). In higher
concentrations, e.g. 20%, the toxic effect is somewhat delayed and it
takes about 2.5 billion inhalations before death takes place. The reason
for the delay is the difference in the mechanism of the toxic effect of
oxygen in 20% concentration. It apparently contributes to a complex
process called aging, of which very little is known, except that it is
always fatal.

However, the main disadvantage of the 20% oxygen concentration is in the
fact it is habit forming. The first inhalation (occurring at birth) is
sufficient to make oxygen addiction permanent. After that, any
considerable decrease in the daily oxygen doses results in death with
symptoms resembling those of cyanide poisoning.

Oxygen is an extreme fire hazard. All of the fires that were reported in
the continental U.S. for the period of the past 25 years were found to be
due to the presence of this gas in the atmosphere surrounding the buildings
in question.

Oxygen is especially dangerous because it is odorless, colorless and
tasteless, so that its presence can not be readily detected until it is
too late.
-- Chemical & Engineering News February 6, 1956