If you have been working on open standard RISC-V ISA CPU cores, there is a high chance that you have come across WARP-V. For newbies, WARP-V is a RISC-V CPU core generator written in TL-Verilog (Transaction-Level Verilog) that supports not only RISC-V but also MIPS ISA. WARP-V has been in discussion for a while due to its unparalleled architectural scalability in a small amount of code. The famous proverb “Necessity is the mother of invention” applies to the invention of TL-Verilog and with that this WARP-V CPU core generator. For decades, hundreds of engineers have been working on designing a single CPU core that was more complex in the race to achieve higher single-core performance. But with recent developments in the semiconductor industry, developer and engineer Steve Hoover, with decades of experience in designing CPU cores, has come up with the idea of developing a WARP-V core in just 1.5 […]
Linux 5.13 Release – Notable changes, Arm, MIPS and RISC-V architectures
Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 5.13: So we had quite the calm week since rc7, and I see no reason to delay 5.13. The shortlog for the week is tiny, with just 88 non-merge commits (and a few of those are just reverts). It’s a fairly random mix of fixes, and being so small I’d just suggest people scan the appended shortlog for what happened. Of course, if the last week was small and calm, 5.13 overall is actually fairly large. In fact, it’s one of the bigger 5.x releases, with over 16k commits (over 17k if you count merges), from over 2k developers. But it’s a “big all over” kind of thing, not something particular that stands out as particularly unusual. Some of the extra size might just be because 5.12 had that extra rc week. And with 5.13 out the door, that obviously means […]
Linux 5.12 – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS and RISC-V Architectures
Linux 5.12 release was expected last Sunday, but Linus Torvalds decided to release one more release candidate, namely Linux 5.12-RC8, to “make sure things are all settled down“, so the latest Linux kernel is now expected this weekend. Tihs should not yield any significant changes, so we can check what’s new in Linux 5.12, notably with regards to Arm, MIPS, and RISC-V architectures often used in SoC’s found in embedded systems. Around two months ago, the release of Linux 5.11 added support for Intel’s software guard extensions (SGX) and Platform Monitoring Technology (PMT), AMD “Van Gogh” and “Dimgrey cavefish” graphics processors, MIPI I3C host controller interfaces, and much more. Some interesting changes in Linux 5.12 include: Added support for ACRN hypervisor designed for IoT & embedded devices Added support for Playstation DualSense & Nintendo 64 game controllers, as well as Nintendo 64 data cartridges Dynamic thermal power management via a […]
Linux 5.11 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS & RISC-V Architectures
Linus Torvalds has released Linux 5.11 just in time for… “Valentine’s Day”: Nothing unexpected or particularly scary happened this week, so here we are – with 5.11 tagged and pushed out. In fact, it’s a smaller-than-average set of commits from rc7 to final, which makes me happy. And I already have several pull requests lined up for tomorrow, so we’re all set for the merge window to start. But in the meantime – and yes, I know it’s Valentine’s Day here in the US – maybe give this release a good testing before you go back and play with development kernels. All right? Because I’m sure your SO will understand. Linus Last time around, Linux 5.10 was an LTS release that added EXT-4 performance enhancements, improved post-Spectre performance, as well as the enablement of BCM2711 (Raspberry Pi 4) display pipeline, among other many changes. Some of the notable changes in […]
Ingenic T40 4K Video & AI Vision Processor mixes MIPS & RISC-V cores with AI accelerator
Ingenic T31 MIPS & RISC-V AI video processor was introduced last year with the MIPS core including SIMD128 Vector instructions for deep learning. The Chinese company has now introduced the new Ingenic T40 processor still with MIPS and RISC-V cores, but also a dedicated 8 TOPS AI engine/CNN accelerator. The new processor is especially suited to smart AI vision application thanks to support for 4K cameras, and 4K MJPEG/H.264/H.265 hardware video encoding, complemented by the 8 TOPS AI engine for computer vision workloads such as people detection, face recognition, object detection, and so on. Ingenic T40 key features and specifications: CPU – Dual-core MIPS XBurst2 @ 1.2 GHz with 256KB L2 Cache, SIMD512 instruction set MCU – 600MHz RISC-V coprocessor AI Engine – 8 TOPS neural network accelerator with 1MB memory pool, support for int16/int8/int4/int2 convolution width Memory – DDR2/DDR3/DDR3L up to 2GB Storage – SPI NOR flash, SPI NAND flash, […]
Linux 5.10 LTS release – Main changes, Arm, MIPS and RISC-V architectures
Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 5.10: Ok, here it is – 5.10 is tagged and pushed out. I pretty much always wish that the last week was even calmer than it was, and that’s true here too. There’s a fair amount of fixes in here, including a few last-minute reverts for things that didn’t get fixed, but nothing makes me go “we need another week”. Things look fairly normal. It’s mostly drivers – as it should be – with a smattering of fixes all over: networking, architectures, filesystems, tooling.. The shortlog is appended, and scanning it gives a good idea of what kind of things are there. Nothing that looks scary: most of the patches are very small, and the biggest one is fixing pin mapping definitions for a pincontrol driver. This also obviously means that the merge window for 5.11 will start tomorrow. I already have a couple […]
Linux 5.9 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS & RISC-V Architectures
Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 5.9 on lkml: Ok, so I’ll be honest – I had hoped for quite a bit fewer changes this last week, but at the same time there doesn’t really seem to be anything particularly scary in here. It’s just more commits and more lines changed than I would have wished for. The bulk of this is the networking fixes that I already mentioned as being pending in the rc8 release notes last weekend. In fact, about half the patch (and probably more of the number of commits) is from the networking stuff (both drivers and elsewhere). Outside of that, the most visible thing is a reinstatement of the fbdev amba-clcd driver – that’s a noticeable patch, but it’s basically just mainly a revert. The rest is really really tiny (mostly some other minor driver updates, but some filesystem and architecture fixes […]
Linux 5.8 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS, and RISC-V Architectures
Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 5.8: So I considered making an rc8 all the way to the last minute, but decided it’s not just worth waiting another week when there aren’t any big looming worries around. Because despite the merge window having been very large, there really hasn’t been anything scary going on in the release candidates. Yeah, we had some annoying noise with header file dependencies this week, but that’s not a new annoyance, and it’s also not the kind of subtle bug that keeps me up at night worrying about it. It did reinforce how nice it would be if we had some kind of tooling support to break nasty header file dependencies automatically, but if wishes were horses.. Maybe some day we’ll have some kind of SAT-solver for symbol dependencies that can handle all our different architectures and configurations, but right now it’s just a manual […]