From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S271723AbTHDNJo (ORCPT ); Mon, 4 Aug 2003 09:09:44 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S271724AbTHDNJn (ORCPT ); Mon, 4 Aug 2003 09:09:43 -0400 Received: from 34.mufa.noln.chcgil24.dsl.att.net ([12.100.181.34]:10739 "EHLO tabby.cats.internal") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S271723AbTHDNJm (ORCPT ); Mon, 4 Aug 2003 09:09:42 -0400 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII From: Jesse Pollard To: "Ihar 'Philips' Filipau" , Werner Almesberger Subject: Re: TOE brain dump Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2003 08:08:50 -0500 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.2] Cc: Linux Kernel Mailing List References: <20030803151000.D10280@almesberger.net> <3F2E1F7B.3020906@softhome.net> In-Reply-To: <3F2E1F7B.3020906@softhome.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: <03080408085000.03433@tabby> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Monday 04 August 2003 03:55, Ihar 'Philips' Filipau wrote: > Werner Almesberger wrote: > > Ihar 'Philips' Filipau wrote: > >> Modern NPUs generally do this. > > > > Unfortunately, they don't - they run *some* code, but that > > is rarely a Linux kernel, or a substantial part of it. > > Embedded CPU we are using is based MIPS, and has a lot of specialized > instructions. > It makes not that much sense to run kernel (especially Linux) on CPU > which is optimized for handling of network packets. (And has actually > several co-processors to help in this task). > How much sense it makes to run general purpose OS (optimized for PCs > and servers) on devices which can make only couple of functions? (and no > MMU btw) > It is a whole idea behind this kind of CPUs - to do a few of > functions - but to do them good. > > If you will start stretching CPUs like this to fit Linux kernel - it > will generally just increase price. Probably there are some markets > which can afford this. > > Remeber - "Small is beatiful" (c) - and linux kernel far from it. > Our routing code which handles two GE interfaces (actually not pure > GE, but up to 2.5GB) fits into 3k. 3k of code - and that's it. not 650kb > of bzip compressed bloat. And it handles two interfaces, handles fast > data path from siblign interfaces, handles up to 1E6 routes. 3k of code. > not 650k of bzip. And it handles ipfilter? and LSM security hooks? how about IPSec? and IPv6? I don't think so.