Google's "Lanai" Backend In LLVM Seeks Non-Experimental Status

Written by Michael Larabel in LLVM on 25 July 2016 at 10:34 AM EDT. Add A Comment
LLVM
Earlier this year Google published an LLVM "Lanai" back-end for some of its internal network hardware. While some in the open-source community interpreted this as Google trying to offload their open-source code into LLVM to shift some of the maintenance burden onto them, that hasn't been the case and Google continues improving this back-end for this in-house processor.

Lanai processors remain unavailable outside of Google/Alphabet, but improvements continue to be made to this open-source Lanai code in LLVM. The work has reached a point where Google engineers are seeking to mark this support as "non-experimental."

As part of making the Lanai back-end non-experimental, Google is planning to publish an open-source simulator so that public developers can verify execution of the code. They also plan to publish a Lanai ISA specification documentation.

More details on their latest Lanai LLVM plans here.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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