On Tuesday, July 31, 2018, Bill Kontos vkontogpls@gmail.com wrote:
I've read somewhere that this requires specifically compiled binaries to work because it lacks some instructions. Is that correct? If so will this limitation carry forward to other designs from the team?
From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17643166 Annoyingly this chip lacks the Compressed (RVC) extension, making it incompatible with all existing Linux distros. These will either have to be recompiled without any Compressed instructions (which increases I-cache pressure on other CPUs that do support it), or we'll need to ship two versions of everything. From discussions I believe they've been recompiling Fedora & Debian from sources without RVC.
From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17643762 The shakti effort was started in 2014. As a member of the group I can say that, then RVC was only seen at as optional extension. We got the tapeout opportunity an year ago. Later the riscv community has taken the decision to make RVC extension mandatory for distros without involving most of its committee members. Had we been told earlier would have given the support.
On Tuesday, July 31, 2018, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:
Oh and me, skating around the campus, feeding the monkeys, farting and using um colourful language shall we say, and writing python that spits out BSV like it was born to Rock.
L.
lol. Go back to work, Luke!