NetBSD’s Steve Woodford announces that he has committed various Xscale micro-optimizations to the NetBSD/arm ports. NetBSD/arm is a collective term for NetBSD running on systems based on ARM Ltd’s ARM architecture. Also, NetBSD’s Frank van der Linden announced that he has added gdb support to the tree, as a result the NetBSD/amd64 port is now completely crossbuildable. NetBSD/amd64 is a port to the AMD64 family of processors.
ARM Port Xscale Optimizations on NetBSD; AMD64 Crossbuilding
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Eugenia Loli
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Someone enlighten me about what Xscale is ?
the XScale is Intel’s brandname for the Acorn Reduced Intruction Set Computing Machine (ARM) processor architecture.
It’s an Intel processor for handheld devices such as pocket
PCs.
Many people consider it as being the best designed processor
available.
Whatever they mean by best??
It does clock very high with a very low power comsumption an soon will be MMX capable.(About time)
MMX? whats that
Is a good thing to see oss moving ahead to x86-64 (aka amd-64)
(linux+*bsd+darwin+sun)
Guess who is left behind ?
Oh NetBSD, how do I love thee? Let me count thy ways…
Could this possibly mean that soon i get to dump winCE off my toshiba 330? YEA!
NetBSD/amd64 (then NetBSD/x86-64) was the first free OS written for the AMD 64-bit cpus, back in 2001. the reason why it was not yet released as a formal release is that it required external toolchain (hacked gcc3, gdb, binutils, etc.). now all this is resolved with the upgrade of the toolchain to gcc3.x/gdb 3.5. etc. and NetBSD 2.0 will be the first formal release with fully functional, 64-bit amd64 support (with SMP).
MMX = Multi-Media eXtensions, Intel’s first attempt at a vector unit. It sucks, IMHO. Its tied to the FPU so you cannot run both at the same time, you have to switch between the two, and that includes quite a performance hit. I dunno if that was ever fixed, but I remember the first Pentiums with it and for that reason alone it was dismissed by most people I knew. They were faster then a normal Pentium tho, but only due to the extra cache. The Pentium II was esentially the Pentium Pro with MMX, the Pentium III a P II with SSE, etc. The Pentium 4, however, is a different core. I was curious how lon they could drag along the i686 core. The first Unreal made use of it, apparently for the lighting and such. *shrugs* SSE is better, and AltiVec even better yet. 🙂
I don’t know about NetBSD, but HP/Compaq has been sponsoring Linux for their iPaq range for years, e.g. http://familiar.handhelds.org/
I think they’ve been working on the XScale, so porting netbsd is certainly achievable on pocketpc devices.
Can someone tell me if the power management is working yet on an Jornada 728? I really hate Wince and am loath to keep using it.