mips and proprietary instructions

Will Newton will.newton at gmail.com
Sun Mar 25 21:11:11 UTC 2007


On 3/25/07, Mike Frysinger <vapier at gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Sunday 25 March 2007, JB wrote:
> > The kernel is not the problem.  The processor will execute them if and
> > when encountered.  The compiler already does not emit them.  It is the
> > memcpy.S code distributed in any version of uClibc > 0.9.26 that has
> > them already in assembly form.  I would be rewriting the mips assembly
> > and the last mips assembly I worked on was many many years ago.  I would
> > have thought the open source community would have opposed the
> > proprietary instructions and worked to avoid them in the first place...
> > Has no one dealt with this?  I searched on google for quite a while and
> > was unable to find any kind of existing solution out there.
>
> you say "proprietary instructions" yet you dont actually provide any real
> examples of what you're talking about

Several MIPS instructions have been patented. The patent expired
recently, but several "MIPS compatible" cores, including quite
probably the Chinese Godson chip, do not implement them:

http://jonahprobell.com/lexra.html



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