Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S271415AbTHDIyw (ORCPT ); Mon, 4 Aug 2003 04:54:52 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S271418AbTHDIyw (ORCPT ); Mon, 4 Aug 2003 04:54:52 -0400 Received: from jive.SoftHome.net ([66.54.152.27]:46751 "HELO jive.SoftHome.net") by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id S271415AbTHDIyv (ORCPT ); Mon, 4 Aug 2003 04:54:51 -0400 Message-ID: <3F2E1F7B.3020906@softhome.net> Date: Mon, 04 Aug 2003 10:55:23 +0200 From: "Ihar 'Philips' Filipau" Organization: Home Sweet Home User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030701 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Werner Almesberger CC: Linux Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: TOE brain dump References: <3F2CFC80.4090401@softhome.net> <20030803151000.D10280@almesberger.net> In-Reply-To: <20030803151000.D10280@almesberger.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1548 Lines: 38 Werner Almesberger wrote: > Ihar 'Philips' Filipau wrote: > >> Modern NPUs generally do this. > > > Unfortunately, they don't - they run *some* code, but that > is rarely a Linux kernel, or a substantial part of it. > Embedded CPU we are using is based MIPS, and has a lot of specialized instructions. It makes not that much sense to run kernel (especially Linux) on CPU which is optimized for handling of network packets. (And has actually several co-processors to help in this task). How much sense it makes to run general purpose OS (optimized for PCs and servers) on devices which can make only couple of functions? (and no MMU btw) It is a whole idea behind this kind of CPUs - to do a few of functions - but to do them good. If you will start stretching CPUs like this to fit Linux kernel - it will generally just increase price. Probably there are some markets which can afford this. Remeber - "Small is beatiful" (c) - and linux kernel far from it. Our routing code which handles two GE interfaces (actually not pure GE, but up to 2.5GB) fits into 3k. 3k of code - and that's it. not 650kb of bzip compressed bloat. And it handles two interfaces, handles fast data path from siblign interfaces, handles up to 1E6 routes. 3k of code. not 650k of bzip. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/