Re: [PATCH v2 1/3] lib: extract 32bit mul/div helpers from nios2 into GENERIC_LIB

[David Laight <david.laight.linux@gmail.com>]

On Tue, 3 Nov 2026 20:23:23 -0800
Vineet Gupta <vgupta@kernel.org> wrote:

> Nios it seems was removed from gcc?

Yep, Intel deprecated it not long before demerging Altera.
Loosely on the basis that they have a RISCV soft cpu for the fpga.
gcc followed (even though the code to support it isn't that big
- I can probably find a copy, you can't download it any more),
as has busybox.

This annoyed the company I worked for (and probably a lot of telco).
RISCV isn't a replacement in any sense, it is missing a lot of
features (like custom instructions) and doesn't have the same level
of customisation.
I wouldn't run Linux on one (you might get 100MHz if you are lucky
and it is definitely in-order one instruction per clock), but it is
useful for 'control pane' logic that would be too complex and large
in straight VHDL/Verilog.
Typically only a few KB of code running in a tight loop.

I've a clean-room copy of the integer part of the cpu - written
in a few weeks (and I'm not really a hardware engineer).

David