Re: Which kernel flavor for big.Little systems?
On Wed, May 07, 2014 at 04:03:04PM +0100, David Goodenough wrote:
> The world of big.Little is about to hit boards that Debian might support
> in the form of the AllWiner A80 (it has 4 big A15 and 4 little A7 processors).
> This is due to hit the marketplace in the form of PcDuino-8 and
> Cubieboard-8 boards next month. The A80 Optimus board is supposed to
> be available this month.
>
> Which kernel flavor should be used? Should it just be treated as a
> 64 bit ARM board, or are all ARM 64 kernels going to be big.Little enabled
> in rather the same way that Amd64 kernels are today - although of course
> in the Amd64 world this only applies to the application code not the kernel?
> If so I would then be able to load either an armhf or an arm64 deb file and
> run the relevant executables I presume.
Well A15/A7 are 32bit (with LPAE for >32bit physical memory). They are
not 64bit.
A53/A57 chips are 64bit.
I think the vexpress in the mp kernel is already A15 based, so probably
the same kernel would make sense.
I am not sure there is any support for big.LITTLE in the current kernel
though, although it is certainly being worked on.
--
Len Sorensen
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