RISC-V Software Support Adds More Features With Linux 5.9

[phoronix]

Phoronix: RISC-V Software Support Adds More Features With Linux 5.9

More kernel architecture features continue to be supported by the RISC-V code with Linux 5.9...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RISC-V-For-Linux-5.9

[brouhaha]

which allows scheduling clock ticks to be avoided on CPUs that are idle or have only one runnable task.

Why is this only possible when there is at most one runnable task? At $dayjob I work with an RTOS that can do this (tickless scheduling) with any number of runnable tasks. I know Linux is not an RTOS, but to my naive view, it seems like the same timer interrupt management concept should be possible.

Years ago i worked on minicomputers that had only two choices for periodic timer interrupts, on or off. There was no setting the interval, or setting a count of how many intervals until the next interrupt, unless you bought expensive add-on hardware, because that required significantly more logic gates, which were 74xx chips. Without the add-on hardware,, the timer interrupt occurred at mains frequency (50 or 60 Hz).

[tildearrow]

Typo?

Stack protector but buffer overflow protection.

[andrei_me]

Any RISC-V hardware news? Seems like 2 years since something new appeared