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Via Phoronix comes news that Debian has been ported to the OpenRISC architecture by Christian Svensson. Quoting his mailing list post: "Some people know that I've been working on porting Glibc and doing some toolchain work. My evil master plan was to make a Debian port, and today I'm a happy hacker indeed! ... If anyone want to try this on real hardware (would be very cool to see how this runs IRL), ping me on IRC [#openrisc on freenode] and I'll set you up with instructions how to use debootstrap - just point to a repo with the debs and you're all set, the wonders of binary distributions." For those who don't know, OpenRISC is the completely open source RISC processor intended as the crown jewel of the Opencores project. A working port of glibc and a GNU/Linux distribution is a huge step toward making use of OpenRISC practical. There's a screencast of the system in action, and source on Github (at posting time, it was a month out of date from the looks of it). Christian Svensson's Github account also has repos for the rest of the toolchain.

Via Phoronix comes news that Debian has been ported to the OpenRISC architecture by Christian Svensson. Quoting his mailing list post: "Some people know that I've been working on porting Glibc and doing some toolchain work. My evil master plan was to make a Debian port, and today I'm a happy hacker indeed! ... If anyone want to try this on real hardware (would be very cool to see how this runs IRL), ping me on IRC [#openrisc on freenode] and I'll set you up with instructions how to use debootstrap - just point to a repo with the debs and you're all set, the wonders of binary distributions." For those who don't know, OpenRISC is the completely open source RISC processor intended as the crown jewel of the Opencores project. A working port of glibc and a GNU/Linux distribution is a huge step toward making use of OpenRISC practical. There's a screencast of the system in action, and source on Github (at posting time, it was a month out of date from the looks of it). Christian Svensson's Github account also has repos for the rest of the toolchain.

diegocg writes "Linux 3.1 has been released. The changes include support for the OpenRISC opensource CPU; performance improvements to the writeback throttling; some speedups in the slab allocator; a new iSCSI implementation; support for NFC chips; bad block management in the generic software RAID layer; a new 'cpupowerutils' utility for power management; filesystem barriers enabled by default in Ext3; Wii Controller support; and [the usual] new drivers and many small improvements."

An anonymous reader writes "The 32-bit OpenRISC CPU has been available for many FPGAs and was turned into a commercial ASIC in 2003. Now, the OpenCores community is asking for donations to create a new ASIC with the OpenRISC CPU, ethernet, PCI, UART, USB and other peripherals. The goal is to be able to sell these ASICs at a low price to anyone who wants to build a cheap embedded system built completely on open source. The OpenRISC currently runs on Linux 2.6.37 and has ports of gcc 4.5.1 among other things."

An anonymous reader writes "MIT recently open-sourced some really cool hardware designs, including an H.264 video decoder and an OFDM transceiver, under MIT's open source license (a.k.a. the X11 license). Now, the OpenCores FAQ recommends that people use either the GPL, LGPL, or modified BSD license; they do not mention the MIT license at all. And, according to the Free Software Foundation the GPL license can be used for hardware, but they do not list the LPGL, modified BSD, or MIT licenses as suitable for non-software. Would you or your company use hardware source-released under the MIT license? What's the best license to use for releasing hardware?"

pagercam2 writes "While Open Source software has many success stories, hardware and particularly chips haven't had as much. While there have been multiple Open Source projects, none have come to a final product until now. The OpenRISC 1000 has been implemented by Flextronics Semiconductor(a division of Flextronics, the contract manufacturer possibly best known for its production of many Cisco products) along with PCI, 10/100 Ethernet, serial, GPIO etc. ... Details and pretty pictures available at OpenCores.org, and it even runs uClinux. Good Job!"

Harry Houdini writes "EETimes has a story about how OpenCores is offering a free 32-bit processor IP core in a move that could undermine such commercial IP licensors as ARM and MIPS. "