AMD to stop working on Geodes

[Edward Cherlin]

2009/1/27 Benjamin M. Schwartz <bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu>:
> Carlos Nazareno wrote:
>> Do ARM processors do these things better than anything else on the
>> market right now? but then you lose the X86 compatibility and this
>> probably breaks things for cross-platform upstream contributions for
>> any deved/researched write-once-run-many apps/projects. (correct me if
>> I'm wrong, am just speculating because I'm not a CE and as well-versed
>> with computer architecture)
>
> Sugar has been tested on both x86 and ARM [1].

How about the XScale version of the ARM architecture? Is anybody
working on that? We need it for the Encore Mobilis port, on Montavista
Linux.

It would be hilarious to me if the XO-2 had an XScale processor, and
Microsoft suddenly had to port Windows XP to it in order to stay in th
game. :-Þ

> I expect it would run
> perfectly on MIPS, PPC, SPARC, Itanium, Alpha...  Linux runs on just about
> every major architecture, and I expect the same of just about any
> Linux-based system.

None of the Geode-specific power management code would work, of
course, but that's kernel-level stuff. It doesn't go into the .xo
bundles or the distro-specific packages.

> I'm not too worried about upstream support.  Our Activities are mostly
> written in Python or portable C, and the underlying operating system is
> typically based on Fedora, Debian[2], Gentoo[3]... which already support
> all of the above architectures.
>
> It's true that you lose the ability to run arbitrary binaries from other
> platforms, but this is only important if you care about closed-source
> code.

That means, for us, Flash and drivers. There are Open Source BIOS
equivalents for some of these architectures.

> Most important open source programs are easily recompiled for any
> architecture.
>
> --Ben
>
> [1] http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardSugar
> [2] http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/installmanual
> [3] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/index.xml#doc_chap4
>
>
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http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Mokurai (Ed Cherlin)