Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

ARM Publishes 64-bit "AArch64" Linux Kernel Support

Posted by timothy on from the avoiding-the-wrath-of-linus dept.

An anonymous reader writes "ARM Holdings has made available Linux kernel support for AArch64, the ARMv8 64-bit architecture. No 64-bit ARMv8 hardware is yet shipping until later this year, but ARM has prepared the 36 patches amounting to 23,000 lines of architecture code for mainline integration."

23 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. Well done by Lefty2446 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's awesome that a major chip manufacturer is willing to invest time to implement a new architecture in the Linux kernel.

    Pity that windows isn't open sourced, they wont benefit from this effort ;-)

    1. Re:Well done by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 2

      Of course MS will benefit. Their ARM Surface computers will fail due to lack of win32 x86 compatibility.

      2015 will be the year of Office on 64bit Android.

    2. Re:Well done by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      This may help though. This means that much less time and investment is needed to get your new device up and running, providing a convincing a convincing case for switching to free software. Had Linux been ported later, this advantage would have been lost.

    3. Re:Well done by lister+king+of+smeg · · Score: 2

      ah yeah they will just not for consumers it will be used in linux servers

      --
      ---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
    4. Re:Well done by Kalriath · · Score: 2

      He means that all the ARM hardware will be shipped with Windows 8 and SecureBoot enabled and locked to only run Windows 8 (actually, this isn't strictly true - Microsoft only dictates that SecureBoot be on and locked enabled on ARM, but if you could convince an ARM manufacturer to ship with a Linux SecureBoot signature, then you could still run Linux on it).

      --
      For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
    5. Re:Well done by jd · · Score: 4, Informative

      Don't be so sure - first to market is a major factor in business and if Linux is likely to beat all other rival OS' by a large enough margin in time, commercial vendors will look at that very seriously. More than a few would likely "gamble" (*cough*) on a free OS and gain marketshare when the profits are high than risk coming in very late when there's much less money floating around, a much higher entry fee and customers unhappy with them being late to the party.

      It is, of course, essential that the chip works (remember Transmeta?), but hardware sells when there's software and if there's Linux support then there's software - and a lot of it. Assuming nobody has messed up, the chip is going to get deployed. The question is only one of where. Phones, yes, but not necessarily immediately as a lot of apps are compiled natively (not to an intermediate form) and the market is crowded with patent trolls right now.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    6. Re:Well done by justforgetme · · Score: 2

      Well, sort of.

      All mobile devices I have seen with a modifiable bootloader weren't what you would call top of the line products.
      And there exactly lies my rant in. All mobile devices worth working on (except the now abandoned n900 and n9)
      are locked down into some sort of proprietary eco system, yes that's right I'm calling Google a proprietary eco
      system.

      It's plainly disappointing.

      --
      -- no sig today
    7. Re:Well done by Ginger+Unicorn · · Score: 4, Informative

      ARM holdings isn't a manufacturer, they're a design company that license the architecture to many manufacturers.

      --
      (1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
    8. Re:Well done by beelsebob · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Do you really think Microsoft provides their kernel source to ARM? Do you REALLY think ARM would code hardware support in windows for free?

      Yes, and yes. It's in both their interests to do so, Microsoft's, because it gets them kernel support for a new arch written for free, ARM's because it sells chips (and by extension, chip designs).

    9. Re:Well done by peppepz · · Score: 2

      HTC did let me unlock the bootloader of my android device. It's not an end-user-friendly procedure though.

    10. Re:Well done by Tubal-Cain · · Score: 2

      Pity that windows isn't open sourced, they wont benefit from this effort ;-)

      I assume porting to the NT kernel would require virtually re-writing them from the ground up to fit NT's structure, so not much lost there.

    11. Re:Well done by Idbar · · Score: 2

      No, it doesn't make it more awesome. It's necessary for them given they license their product. No manufacturer will buy stuff that it's not properly supported, and more when they still have to put additional hardware in the chip and integrate they whole system. This is just properly putting your tools in place for real manufacturers to start developing.

    12. Re:Well done by unixisc · · Score: 2

      But that's only true about ARM tablets from Microsoft. The rest of them - from Samsung, Google Nexus, Mot Xoom, HTC, et al - are all shipping w/ Android, and are not gonna go Windows RT. And w/ Microsoft planning to price them @ par w/ the iPhones and iPads, one can be sure that they won't be selling much either - in the end, they may just have to do what HP did w/ TouchPads.

    13. Re:Well done by OrangeTide · · Score: 2

      Not true. nvidia's project Denver will have to run a free OS if it is really going to be available for "personal computers, servers, and supercomputers"

      --
      “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    14. Re:Well done by tlhIngan · · Score: 2

      If they don't manufacture physical objects, and the companies are "only buying the specs" then how do ARM processors get built?

      There are two kinds of ARM licensees. One is purely a block licensee - these guys basically buy the ARM RTL ready to be synthesized and plopped on silicon (or tested on FPGAs). Most ARM licensees go this route.

      The other is a microarchitecture license. There are only 3 known ones - Marvell (acquired from Intel who got it from Compaq, who got it from DEC), Qualcomm, and Apple (who actually invested in ARM very early on). These guys basically get access to the RTL and can make their own changes to it - basically to make an instruction-set compatible version of the ARM processor that doesn't have to be derived from

      ARM generates the architecture and cores, and now they've basically put in place the necessary code to support their upcoming 64-bit processors.

      And while no silicon current exists of the 64-bit (AArch64 - ARM Architecture 64-bit, the 32-bit one we're familiar with is now called AArch32), ARM would've tested it on FPGAs against their cores, so they'll work.

      Of course, you haven't done Linux until you've tried to boot it on an FPGA system where the processor runs at 5MHz or so. Or faster if you disable items. (Linux 3.x took around 3-5 minutes to boot in a minimal configuration from "Uncompressing Linux" until it got to a shell prompt. One configuration with dual processors I've used only ran at 2.5MHz. Took 20 minutes to boot - 10 minutes from "Uncompressing Linux" to "done. Booting the kernel", and a further 10 to go from that to shell prompt.).

  2. I bet Gumstix will support 64-Bit ARM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    I have a Gumstix Overo Fire COM - "Computer On Module". It really is about a size of a stick of chewing gum, however the I/O board it mounts on is much bigger. I'm heavily into woodworking, so I'm planning to make a real nice hardwood case for my Gumstix Android Tablet.

    Gumstix sells individual units to hobbyists, but most of us have commercial products in mind, at which point Gumstix offers volume discounts.

    The schematics of the I/O boards are Open Source.

    Michael David Crawford, who can't be bothered to recover his password.

  3. Re:Bandwidth? by romiz · · Score: 5, Informative

    Do you realize that the chip on the other end of a SATA link - typically the controller in the SSD you're using right now - has a lot of chances to be an ARM chip ? It is the case for common SSD disk controllers (Marvell or Sandforce).

    And even if it is not common in today's products, there are a lot of recent high-level ARM SoCs that offer SATA - not least because its low pin count makes it easier to route on the board in the end than a parallel bus. For example, TI's OMAP5, Freescale i.MX53 or CSR's Prima 2 have SATA support.

  4. Re:Bandwidth? by gl4ss · · Score: 2

    well, there's plenty of use to having lots of memory, especially because the storage is slow.

    if you'd like to start using them for clustered db's etc, then the memory is very useful.

    afaik it's 48bit memory addressing though what it supports.

    --
    world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  5. Re:Bandwidth? by Exrio · · Score: 3, Informative

    afaik it's 48bit memory addressing though what it supports

    For the record, it's also what most current AMD64 implementations support: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Architectural_features

  6. Get ready for the next wave of marketing... by peppepz · · Score: 2
    In 2012, the must-have feature for smartphones is an amount of CPU cores twice as big as the one of the previous generation.
    In 2013, the new cool thing to have will be a 64-bit processor! Like in the good old times of the console wars.

    Seriously though, in the near future the amount of available address space to be shared between userspace, kernel, GPU etc. might start to become too tight in 32 bits even for smartphones, at least the biggest ones.

  7. Re:Bandwidth? by LordNimon · · Score: 2

    Freescale is working on such a chip: http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4375606/Freescale-adopts-ARM-cores-in-QorIQ-line

    --
    And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
    To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
  8. Awesome... 23k lines gives support to a new arch by IYagami · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I think that what is really awesome is that adding just 23k lines of code gives you support for a new CPU architecture!

  9. Re:Great! Now, can we all switch to 64bit, please? by Osgeld · · Score: 2

    Aside from the memory thing, which you dont need to run IE, and Office, I have yet to see a significant reason to run 64 bit windows clients, and it usually saves a little bit of money as well. So unless you want to pay for it (and how did you do your work on a 32 bit win xp machine but now need a 64 bit os?)

    Now linux 64 bit is about as useful as windows XP 64, you want a throwback, hardly anything works out of the box and you spend your time hand compiling what seems like every piddleshit thing. Now granted its been about a year since I tried it, but lets face it, linux people drag their feet kicking and screaming over improving something, when they could be doing something fun ... like redesigning the desktop theme every minor release