6 ms·

(Mill team) We started with 6 planned talks; it has since grown to 9, and shows no signs of stopping there :) So if you have a subject you want us to explain,

(Mill team) We started with 6 planned talks; it has since grown to 9, and shows no signs of stopping there :) So if you have a subject you want us to explain, or you want to invite us to give a talk at your uni or workplace (no promises!), please just ask (here or on the Mill forums http://millcomputing.com/forum/the-mill/ http://millcomputing.com/forum/the-mill/ or mail me: will at mill computing dot com)

timClicks 12y ago
How big is the Mill team, by the way?
vanderZwan 12y ago
So I think all fans of the talks would really love to have a little Mill CPU of their own to play with for some hacking project. I imagine high prices due to economies of scale will be a problem in the beginning, but if we think longer term and assume you guys overcome that initial hurdle, any dreams of incorporating the Mill into a platform like Raspberry Pi or Arduino?
- willvarfar 12y ago
  We fully expect dev boards to be available, although hopefully you'll be able to buy high-end Mill chips too.
sitkack 12y ago
It would be really nice to have a Mill simulator, perhaps running on a web page.
- belovedeagle 12y ago
  Unfortunately, a simulator running in javascript—and that's what you're suggesting, one way or the other—would run so amazingly slowly that it would be completely useless. Especially one which is, if I understood the latest talk correctly, sub-cycle accurate. (To give you an idea, I think I recall Ivan saying that their simulator takes/would take 1 week to boot linux—and that's in c!)
  - szatkus 12y ago
    We have x86 simulator in JS: http://bellard.org/jslinux/ http://bellard.org/jslinux/ It's slow but usable. With ISA specification someone could make Mill version. I'm sure that their simulator comprises some debug tools. That's why it's so slow.
    - belovedeagle 12y ago
      Ah, good call. I was thinking of the sort of low-level simulator you'd want to play around with an unfamiliar architecture; but as the technical notes on that link say, no single-stepping. Once you want to actually be able to slow things down enough to watch a system run, then it's typically harder to speed them up again, unless you truly have two separate emulation modes which can switch off. It's doable.
szatkus 12y ago
I'm really surprised that Ivan is both a great engineer and a great speaker. Probably because "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." I'm waiting for boards with your CPU. I really want to port some software on it.
- wolfgke 12y ago
  > Probably because "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." People consider different things as simple. For example I often consider very abstract mathematics as very easy to understand (since I always thought in a rather abstract way - thus this kind of explanation is very natural for me), while most people consider my kind of explaining things as "unnecessary complicated". Don't tell me that I haven't understood the topic. When talking about topics that I understood worse, I often tend to give much simpler (and better understandable for "ordinary people") explanations, since I haven't understood the complex connections and thus I'm unable to give a much "simpler" (in my terms; "more complicated" in terms of most people) explanation.
ahomescu1 12y ago
Any chance you could also update the slides as PDFs in addition to all the videos, and maybe even PDF document/HTML versions of the same information in textual form? Some of us prefer reading stuff to watching a talk.
- willvarfar 12y ago
  You may like http://millcomputing.com/topic/introduction-to-the-mill-cpu-programming-model-2/ http://millcomputing.com/topic/introduction-to-the-mill-cpu-...
  - ahomescu1 12y ago
    Yup, looks great. Thanks!
renox 12y ago
One subject which would be interesting would be the changes needed to Linux and to Linux SW to make them work efficiently on the Mill with its unified address space. I'm thinking about COW fork, mmap where I don't find it obvious on how it would work on the mill.. Also are there features on the Mill which are designed to make GCs work more efficiently?
- willvarfar 12y ago
  Excellent feedback! Yes and yes, we will do this type of talk and explain fork() :)

timClicks 12y ago

How big is the Mill team, by the way?

vanderZwan 12y ago

So I think all fans of the talks would really love to have a little Mill CPU of their own to play with for some hacking project. I imagine high prices due to economies of scale will be a problem in the beginning, but if we think longer term and assume you guys overcome that initial hurdle, any dreams of incorporating the Mill into a platform like Raspberry Pi or Arduino?

willvarfar 12y ago
We fully expect dev boards to be available, although hopefully you'll be able to buy high-end Mill chips too.

sitkack 12y ago

It would be really nice to have a Mill simulator, perhaps running on a web page.

belovedeagle 12y ago
Unfortunately, a simulator running in javascript—and that's what you're suggesting, one way or the other—would run so amazingly slowly that it would be completely useless. Especially one which is, if I understood the latest talk correctly, sub-cycle accurate. (To give you an idea, I think I recall Ivan saying that their simulator takes/would take 1 week to boot linux—and that's in c!)
- szatkus 12y ago
  We have x86 simulator in JS: http://bellard.org/jslinux/ http://bellard.org/jslinux/ It's slow but usable. With ISA specification someone could make Mill version. I'm sure that their simulator comprises some debug tools. That's why it's so slow.
  - belovedeagle 12y ago
    Ah, good call. I was thinking of the sort of low-level simulator you'd want to play around with an unfamiliar architecture; but as the technical notes on that link say, no single-stepping. Once you want to actually be able to slow things down enough to watch a system run, then it's typically harder to speed them up again, unless you truly have two separate emulation modes which can switch off. It's doable.

szatkus 12y ago

I'm really surprised that Ivan is both a great engineer and a great speaker. Probably because "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." I'm waiting for boards with your CPU. I really want to port some software on it.

wolfgke 12y ago
> Probably because "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." People consider different things as simple. For example I often consider very abstract mathematics as very easy to understand (since I always thought in a rather abstract way - thus this kind of explanation is very natural for me), while most people consider my kind of explaining things as "unnecessary complicated". Don't tell me that I haven't understood the topic. When talking about topics that I understood worse, I often tend to give much simpler (and better understandable for "ordinary people") explanations, since I haven't understood the complex connections and thus I'm unable to give a much "simpler" (in my terms; "more complicated" in terms of most people) explanation.

ahomescu1 12y ago

Any chance you could also update the slides as PDFs in addition to all the videos, and maybe even PDF document/HTML versions of the same information in textual form? Some of us prefer reading stuff to watching a talk.

willvarfar 12y ago
You may like http://millcomputing.com/topic/introduction-to-the-mill-cpu-programming-model-2/ http://millcomputing.com/topic/introduction-to-the-mill-cpu-...
- ahomescu1 12y ago
  Yup, looks great. Thanks!

renox 12y ago

One subject which would be interesting would be the changes needed to Linux and to Linux SW to make them work efficiently on the Mill with its unified address space. I'm thinking about COW fork, mmap where I don't find it obvious on how it would work on the mill.. Also are there features on the Mill which are designed to make GCs work more efficiently?

willvarfar 12y ago
Excellent feedback! Yes and yes, we will do this type of talk and explain fork() :)