Linux 5.14 To Support The OpenPOWER Microwatt Soft CPU Core

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux 5.14 To Support The OpenPOWER Microwatt Soft CPU Core

Announced two years ago was the OpenPOWER Microwatt as an FPGA-based soft CPU core...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OpenPOWER-Microwatt-5.14

[skeevy420]

ROFL. When I read the headline the first time my mind saw it as "The OpenPOWER MicroSoft CPU Core" and quickly went to all sorts of tinfoil hat places

Then I saw the banner in the article

[Jabberwocky]

I did not expect that it is required to produce physical devices that have mainline support in order to gain attention or become popular.

My observation is that people like to work on or play with devices that they can physically own or interact with. It's a step in the right direction to build communities and improve collaboration. Initially I thought it was extremely bad to use the SkyWater/Efabless 130nm process. Compared to today's standards... I read up on it quickly and found that it's actually an effort to open up part of the fabrication integration. While this isn't my area of research I was surprised by it.

If I was part of the project I would try to get someone like Derek Muller or Destin Sandlin to visit the plants and talk about this development.

I probably won't see these devices here in South Africa, but I'll be keeping an eye out for it at the end of this year and early 2022.

Good luck to everyone involved! This is actually very exciting.

[CochainComplex]

Just for my understandig. Whilst the product is not available yet i could progam a suitable e.g. xilinx fpga and use it to run the next 5.14 kernel on it with witch powerpc arch selected?

[KesZerda]

Just for my understandig. Whilst the product is not available yet i could progam a suitable e.g. xilinx fpga and use it to run the next 5.14 kernel on it with witch powerpc arch selected?

In theory. The project includes rules for getting it running on an FPGA, but I imagine you'd need to put a some amount of work into it to get it to a point where it would run Linux. The examples in the github tree seem more about using it for micropython and other embedded type things.

[tildearrow]

Typo:

the early state of the platfom with not yet having any SMp, VMX, VSX, transactional memory, or other features found with mature POWER hardware.