Linux Now Supports Oracle's SPARC-T4

With the Linux 3.7 kernel there is now support for the SPARC-T4 processor that Oracle introduced last year.

David Miller sent in the SPARC pull request today for the Linux 3.7 merge window. "Largely this is simply adding support for the Niagara 4 cpu. Major areas are perf events (chip now supports 4 counters and can monitor any event on each counter), crypto (opcodes are availble for sha1, sha256, sha512, md5, crc32c, AES, DES, CAMELLIA, and Kasumi although the last is unsupported since we lack a generic crypto layer Kasumi implementation), and an optimized memcpy."

The SPARC-T4 from Oracle offers eight cores per chip with each core providing eight threads to provide a highly multi-threaded experience. This chip also supports out-of-order integer execution, one floating point unit, and a dedicated cryptography unit per core. The 64-thread processor is built on a 40nm process. The T4 was developed under the codename "Yosemite Falls."