News: 0001531454

  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)

Linux Gaining SMP Support For The OpenPOWER Microwatt

([Linux Kernel] 6 Hours Ago Multiple Cores)


Open-sourced back in 2019 was the OpenPOWER Microwatt as an open-source, soft processor core of Power ISA 3.0 and intended for use on FPGA boards and then there was seemingly short-lived work to [1]fabricate a Microwatt chip and Microwatt also found its way for [2]use within a BMC implementation . Linux 5.14 [3]added support for this soft CPU core while the upcoming Linux 6.15 cycle is set to introduce SMP support for Microwatt.

Queued up within the Linux PowerPC development tree ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.15 merge window is symmetric multi-processing (SMP) support for the OpenPOWER Microwatt.

This adds support for Microwatt systems with more than one CPU core and the default DeviceTree is now adapted for a two-core Microwatt.

This Microwatt SMP support is queued up within [4]powerpc/linux.git's "next" branch ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window opening in late March.

This is the first I've heard of Microwatt in some time with the likes of [5]Libre-SOC having failed. Nice to see there still is some activity around this OpenPOWER soft core.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenPOWER-Microwatt-Fab

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/LibreBMC-Demo

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-5.14-POWER

[4] https://web.git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/powerpc/linux.git/commit/?h=next&id=aca95fb6bb572a77f39d42d83ab72a965026577d

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Libre-SOC


phoronix

While the engineer developed his thesis, the director leaned over to
his assistant and whispered, "Did you ever hear of why the sea is salt?"
"Why the sea is salt?" whispered back the assistant. "What do you
mean?"
The director continued: "When I was a little kid, I heard the story of
`Why the sea is salt' many times, but I never thought it important until just
a moment ago. It's something like this: Formerly the sea was fresh water and
salt was rare and expensive. A miller received from a wizard a wonderful
machine that just ground salt out of itself all day long. At first the miller
thought himself the most fortunate man in the world, but soon all the villages
had salt to last them for centuries and still the machine kept on grinding
more salt. The miller had to move out of his house, he had to move off his
acres. At last he determined that he would sink the machine in the sea and
be rid of it. But the mill ground so fast that boat and miller and machine
were sunk together, and down below, the mill still went on grinding and that's
why the sea is salt."
"I don't get you," said the assistant.
-- Guy Endore, "Men of Iron"