Subject: Re: linux support for freescale e5500 core?

From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2010 08:03:48 +1000

On Thu, 2010-09-16 at 15:44 -0600, Chris Friesen wrote:
> On 09/16/2010 03:39 PM, Scott Wood wrote:
> > On Thu, 16 Sep 2010 14:06:37 -0600
> > Chris Friesen <[email-masked]> wrote:
> > 
> >> We're looking at maybe doing some work with an e5500-based system.  Is
> >> there any support existing/planned for this core?
> > 
> > Check with whoever you'd be getting the hardware from about a BSP.
> > 
> > And yes, it should be supported upstream at some point.
> 
> We haven't settled on a vendor yet, so I was just wondering in general
> what the story was around support.

Well, the "core" support for 64-bit BookE is upstream (and has been for
a little while) so +/- specific tweaks FSL may have done and the usual
SoC/board support, it shouldn't be too far off.

> Right.  We currently use a 970-series cpu and have implemented a
> per-process flag to indicate whether 32-byte mode is needed or not.
> We'd have to do something similar with the new cpu.

Sounds like a candidate for upstreaming the patch :-)

> One last question--can you comment on the speed of an e5500 relative to
> a 970 for integer operations?

Cheers,
Ben.