> Hello Miguel :-)
>
> Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> ...
> > Judging from the progress made by the Linux UltraPenguin team (David,
> > Jakub Richard), once the specs for this chip are out, a fully
> > functional Linux distribution for the Merced can be put together in
> > about two months. Probably less.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Miguel.
>
> OK, it's true that Linux has some brilliant programmers available that
> could work full-tilt on putting together a Linux distribution in record
> time. But the SPARC port is not the best basis of comparison with the
> Merced:
>
> 1) The SPARC architecture has been around for quite some time, so many
> people have had a chance to program in SPARC assembly language.
>
> 2) The machines are quite common by now, specially in academic settings.
> It's quite easy to find a SPARC machine where one can get a user
> account.
>
> 3) GCC has been ported to the SPARC for quite some time.
This is not true for the 64bit UltraSparc v9 architecture. AFAIK the
Ultrasparc team had to do a lot of gcc hackery to get an usable gcc for
the port (Solaris is still completely 32bit - Linux is the only OS which
uses the 64bit features of the chip). The architecture is significantly
different from the traditional sparc too - that's why sparc64 has its
own directory under arch/
> Merced does not fulfill any of these conditions.
I agree that it would be harder to port gcc to EPIC. It seems that it is
a much more radical design than even v9 sparc (very big register file,
VLIW, ...) AFAIK gcc hasn't been ported to a VLIW machine yet. It's
probably doable though.
-Andi