ARM Publishes 64-bit "AArch64" Linux Kernel Support 90
An anonymous reader writes "ARM Holdings has made available Linux kernel support for AArch64, the ARMv8 64-bit architecture. No 64-bit ARMv8 hardware is yet shipping until later this year, but ARM has prepared the 36 patches amounting to 23,000 lines of architecture code for mainline integration."
I bet Gumstix will support 64-Bit ARM (Score:2, Informative)
I have a Gumstix Overo Fire COM - "Computer On Module". It really is about a size of a stick of chewing gum, however the I/O board it mounts on is much bigger. I'm heavily into woodworking, so I'm planning to make a real nice hardwood case for my Gumstix Android Tablet.
Gumstix sells individual units to hobbyists, but most of us have commercial products in mind, at which point Gumstix offers volume discounts.
The schematics of the I/O boards are Open Source.
Michael David Crawford [dulcineatech.com], who can't be bothered to recover his password.
Re:Well done (Score:5, Informative)
Don't be so sure - first to market is a major factor in business and if Linux is likely to beat all other rival OS' by a large enough margin in time, commercial vendors will look at that very seriously. More than a few would likely "gamble" (*cough*) on a free OS and gain marketshare when the profits are high than risk coming in very late when there's much less money floating around, a much higher entry fee and customers unhappy with them being late to the party.
It is, of course, essential that the chip works (remember Transmeta?), but hardware sells when there's software and if there's Linux support then there's software - and a lot of it. Assuming nobody has messed up, the chip is going to get deployed. The question is only one of where. Phones, yes, but not necessarily immediately as a lot of apps are compiled natively (not to an intermediate form) and the market is crowded with patent trolls right now.
Re:Well done (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bandwidth? (Score:5, Informative)
And even if it is not common in today's products, there are a lot of recent high-level ARM SoCs that offer SATA - not least because its low pin count makes it easier to route on the board in the end than a parallel bus. For example, TI's OMAP5, Freescale i.MX53 or CSR's Prima 2 have SATA support.
Re:Bandwidth? (Score:3, Informative)
afaik it's 48bit memory addressing though what it supports
For the record, it's also what most current AMD64 implementations support: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Architectural_features [wikipedia.org]