Linux 3.1 Released With Support for the OpenRISC CPU

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."

Comments

Where can I get one?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where can I get an OpenRISC CPU and a motherboard that will support it, and how much do they cost compared to Intel/AMD CPUs of similar performance?

Re:Where can I get one?

[vlm]

Where can I get an OpenRISC CPU and a motherboard that will support it,

http://opencores.org/or1k/FPGA_Development_Boards

I have not bothered to research why its listed as supporting the Spartan-3A DSP 1800 and not the spartan3 dev board I have sitting at home, probably needs more gates? Or depends on some part of the DSP1800's innards? Or simply the dude who did it owned a DSP1800 as opposed to the board I have at home?

and how much do they cost compared to Intel/AMD CPUs of similar performance?

Which vegetable has similar price to an apple or an orange? Perhaps a potatoe?

The thing with FPGAs is... how much do you wanna spend? I know there are simply gigantic FPGA arrays out there, so on one FPGA chip you could probably put a whole Beowulf cluster of a dozen of these things on one chip complete with the ethernet switch that interconnects them. So its kind of meaningless, like debating the weight of a soul.

The goal of a FPGA system is not to be a generic processor, but to use the field programability... you use the embedded CPU for generic "who cares how fast" stuff like a user interface, or a TCP network stack, or a DHCP client. You do all the heavy lifting inside FPGA hardware itself. If you used this CPU for a FPGA based mythtv frontend, you would not write a H.264 decoder in the emulated RISC processor assembly language, you'd use a hardware one (or at least hardware accelerated one) inside the FPGA written in verilog or VHDL. If you're running benchmarks on the FPGA processor trying to optimize it, you're probably doing it Very wrong, or trying some insane level of optimization / price cutting.

Cool, Now Fix Sandy Bridge

[steevven1]

Now they just need to fix support for Intel Sandy Bridge processors...

Re:3.1! and I'm still stuck on 2.6...

[TheSpoom]

Don't feel too bad, from what I remember Linus just randomly decided that a minor number of the 2.6 series was now 3.0 a few months back.