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Unfortunately the SoC they've chosen, while technically supporting little endian, doesn't include the VMX extensions to the ISA IIRC, which all (?) distros requ
by spijdar 5y ago
Unfortunately the SoC they've chosen, while technically supporting little endian, doesn't include the VMX extensions to the ISA IIRC, which all (?) distros require as they generally assume ppc64le = POWER8 or higher, which include VMX. There may be other caveats, but at the very least, you'd need a custom distro to get LE working on it, with special build flags used to restrict it to Altivec instructions.
- monocasa 5y agoEverything I'm looking at says that the T2080 SoC they've chosen contains e6500 CPU cores, which contain VMX units (also known as AltiVec). Unless you're talking about later additions to the VMX ISA, and not the VMX unit wholesale. I'm also seeing the e6500 listed as Power 2.06 compliant, just the same as POWER8. AltiVec is just NXP's (nee Freescale's nee Motorola's) trademark for VMX just like Velocity Engine is Apple's trademark.
- spijdar 5y agoI was mistaken, but the end result is the same. It's VSX that's POWER7 and higher specific, which is an extension of VMX/Altivec. The reality is actually worse -- Altivec/VMX doesn't work at all in little-endian on the e6500. https://www.nxp.com/files-static/training/doc/ftf/2014/FTF-NET-F0139.pdf https://www.nxp.com/files-static/training/doc/ftf/2014/FTF-N... (search for "big-endian") So an LE distro for the e6500 would have to built with Altivec support disabled. (The powerpc notebook guys mention this in their FAQ, but sort of vaguely says that modern distros require "some functionality" not provided by the e6500 https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/faq/ https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/faq/)