Intel Houdini is a dynamic binary translation layer to run Arm applications on x86_64 systems. Its targeted platform is Android, but you can use it for _other_ platforms too. It’s much faster than Qemu at that task. Houdini 6 with AArch64 on x86_64 compatibility is available at http://dl.android-x86.org/houdini/6_z/houdini.sfs and for AArch32 on x86_64 at http://dl.android-x86.org/houdini/6_y/houdini.sfs. The patch function… Continue reading Houdini: run Arm 32-bit and 64-bit applications on an x86_64 system
State of the GPU compute APIs today
NVIDIA: Pioneer of the field, mature toolkits. Still evolving quickly, especially for higher-level APIs. Every GPU that NVIDIA sells supports CUDA. The HPC SDK, formerly known as PGI, which is Linux only today, adds support for OpenACC, C++ standard parallelism (stdpar) and OpenMP (support currently in beta). One of the downsides on NVIDIA’s HPC SDK… Continue reading State of the GPU compute APIs today
PCIe quirks on Arm systems w/ ACPI
Taking a look at the list of platforms which have quirks in drivers/acpi/pci_mcfg.c for Arm today: AWS Graviton Qualcomm QDF2432 HiSilicon HIP05/06/07 Cavium ThunderX X-Gene v1 X-Gene v2 Ampere Altra (released this year!) What’s missing here? Any SoC for a platform present at a lower price point. And on why, read https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-acpi/patch/20200103174935.5612-1-vidyas@nvidia.com/ . It’s obvious in this… Continue reading PCIe quirks on Arm systems w/ ACPI
macOS EULA licensing restrictions affecting virtualisation
So what are the biggest restrictions affecting virtualisation of macOS today in the macOS EULA (available at https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSBigSur.pdf)? (iii) to install, use and run up to two (2) additional copies or instances of the Apple Software within virtual operating system environments on each Mac Computer you own or control that is already running the Apple… Continue reading macOS EULA licensing restrictions affecting virtualisation
Standards on Arm platforms for OS support
On the firmware side, an ideally standard Arm machine boots using UEFI and ACPI. The other CPUs are initialised with PSCI and dynamic power management is handled with CPPC. On the hardware side, requirements are having a GIC as an interrupt controller and a standard PCIe ECAM-compliant controller. (+ other sets of MMIO devices, which… Continue reading Standards on Arm platforms for OS support