Re: Flame Linus to a crisp!

John Bradford
2003-04-24T08:44:10Z

> > With open hardware designs, there would be no problem with
> > documentation not being available to write drivers.
>
> See below...
>
> > Incidently, using the Transmeta CPUs, is it not possible for the user
> > to replace the controlling software with their own code? I.E. not
> > bother with X86 compatibility at all, but effectively design your own
> > CPU? Couldn't we make the first Lin-PU this way?
>
> In theory; in practice we have no access to documentation. See above...

I'm now stuck in a mail reading loop, with the see above and see
belows :-)

> That makes Transmeta part of the _old_ industry :)
>
> I believe present Transmeta CPUs are quite specialised for x86
> behaviour (memory model etc.) anyway. When you're running on a CPU
> like that, there's probably little to be gained from changing to a
> different front-end instruction set.
>
> Special tricks like non-cache-ping-ponging locks and faster interrupt
> handling might improve performance, but probably require a change of
> the hardware to implement.

Shame. I guess it wouldn't really have got us any closer to an open
hardware design anyway, it just seemed like a nice hack :-).

John.