On Fri, Dec 15, 2000 at 09:24:22AM +0100, Kevin D. Kissell wrote: > In the absence of the SGI people being directed to do a > clean job, I suppose the problem falls to those who have > an interest in a clean and portable 64-bit MIPS kernel. > That would include MIPS, of course. But what about the > rest of you - could we see a show of virtual hands? I > know that TI has both 4K and 5K licenses, and may > want to be able to exploit the 64-bit capability of the 5K > under Linux. And the guys doing the Vr41xx ports may > also be interested. Anyone else? Those of you with > R4K-based DECstations, perhaps? Software shops > looking to support high-end embedded MIPS in set-tops? > > Another aspect of this is that, in the newer MIPS > designs that conform to the MIPS64 architecture spec, > it is finally possible to cleanly seperate the use of > 64-bit data types from the use of 64-bit virtual addresses. > The processors in the SGI platforms do not have this > capability, and it would be a lot to ask of the people > doing 64-bit Linux for Origin etc. to treat the addressing > and data aspects orthogonally. I haven't checked the > code, but I would imagine that we will have to go in > and redo things from that perspective as well. That's one of the plans I have; even in the absense of these new MIPS64 features separation of these new features makes sense. One of the plans on my agenda is for example the introduction of 2-level pagetables for mips64 which will eleminate much of the extra price the 64-bit kernel currently has to pay. Ralf
