Subject: Re: SMP StrongARM systems?

From: Mark van Doesburg <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 13:55:42 +0200

I'm a total ARM-newbie.  I read through the website and the FAQ
	but I didn't see any mention of the existance of such a system.
	The arm code in 2.2.6 doesn't seem to contain any support for
	SMP, so I assume there are no SMP StrongARM systems (or that if
	there were, they would not work with Linux)....?

With caching hardware in the SA110 it would be a really bad choice to
make a SMP system. If you are looking for a multi-processor system with
StrongARMs however you might be interested in the co285 arch I'm working
on.  This port uses the PCI bus like ethernet and boards with 6
processors should become available (don't ask me when, I'm waiting for
these boards myself.)

greetings,

Mark.
unsubscribe: body of `unsubscribe linux-arm' to [email-masked]

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From: "B. James Phillippe" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 12:12:57 -0700 (PDT)

> 	SMP, so I assume there are no SMP StrongARM systems (or that if
...
> processors should become available (don't ask me when, I'm waiting for

Hmmm.. that could be interesting; I'd like more information when it becomes
available.  The real reason I ask, is because I'm curious about exploring
some efficient, low-cost architectures for one of our products at work.
Our current systems use embedded Intel architecture (chipset and UP
Pentium-class CPU on standard PCI bus).  I enquired about StrongARM because
the low-cost, low power-consumption makes it ideal for a processor driving
small network appliances.  The question about SMP came because I was
thinking that having two modest-paced processors for this kind of
application beats out a single fast processor, because you can be servicing
interrupts and bh's without starving user-space (this isn't a flawed
understanding of 2.2 SMP, is it?  That one processor can be executing a bh
in the kernel while the other is executing on behalf of a user-space
process?)

Thanks everyone for the very helpful answers; I'm not on this list and I
appreciate the cc'd responses. :-)

cheers,
-bp
--
B. James Phillippe		. [email-masked]
Software Engineer, WGT Inc.	. http://www.terran.org/~bryan