Hi Tom
Thanks for educating the misc@ masses on Tile hardware. I have quite a
bit of experience with Tile h/w prior to the EZchip sale, however we could
no longer work with the hardware after the sale.
There was anotherBSD Tile-GX port, however it was never committed to
their tree.
g.day
diana
On Mon, 16 Apr 2018, Tom Smyth wrote:
Hi Diana
That Mikrotik router board is based on originally a tilera chip the chip
owner which was sold to ez chip which then sold to mellanox.
Im not sure what mellanox are doing with the tech
The chip was a tile architecture meaning adding additional cores was easy
(ier) for the manufacturer
From my experience of using hardware is that it is massively parallelising
individual 1 ghz cores..
Early experience was poor enough... aparently many vendors who tfied this
architecture had pains with the quality of the reference linux kernel 3.3x
i believe...
Stability was painful... to be fair it would be difficult for any vendor
trying to run code designed for faster individual cores and then trying to
run on many slower cores...
Packet ordering and through put was painful particularly with encapsulating
/dencapsulating traffic loads
The architecture has some nice features such as interrupt load balancing in
hardware (similar to those found on server chipsets...) nics built directly
ito the chip...
Mikrotik have done an lot of work on reworking their os to use the
architecture better... iron out kinks in the linux kernel on that
architecture... rewritten alot of their code to handle out of order packets
better and to make their code make use of more cores. Alot of their work is
paying off for certain loads but you are limited in what features you can
use on the router in "fast path" to get the big packet rate numbers ...
The build quality of the mikrotik ccrs make them more attractive for
development on than some of their low budget offerings (eg rb2011)
I have 1 x ccr2016 tilera 12 port 16 core router spare if there is an
interested dev who wants to seriously look at the architecture... but with
uncertainty of what mellanox will do with the chip it may be a waste of
time...
Also im not sure how open the architecture and if they have some bsd
licensed code / reference implentation to get development started on it
I hope this helps
Tom Smyth
On Mon 16 Apr 2018, 19:42 Diana Eichert, <deich...@wrench.com> wrote:
I subscribe to the OpenBSD arm list but was wondering what the
appropriate mon-misc list would be for mips based h/w, ex:
Cavium Octeon.
Sometimes I don't want to pollute misc@ with h/w specific
questions.
thanks
diana
PS Anyone seen this hardware,
https://mikrotik.com/product/CCR1036-12G-4S-EM ?
