State of SMP / dual-core for MV78200?
Hello!
I have a Marvell Discover MV78200 at hand and am wondering about the multi core support in ARM Linux for it. I know that the Marvell based kernel suports dual-system, i.e. booting two kernel instances on the two cores. I also see that the upstream kernel still has the hooks for this in the board support files (for distributing the resources between the cores). Does anyone here know about the status about this dual-system support?
And wouldn't SMP also work on such CPUs, i.e. having one kernel instance with two cores? For the application in question SMP would make more sense (high data I/O traffic).
Any information is welcome!
Cheers
nils
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Quoted 11 lines · Nils Faerber
Hello!
I have a Marvell Discover MV78200 at hand and am wondering about the multi core support in ARM Linux for it. I know that the Marvell based kernel suports dual-system, i.e. booting two kernel instances on the two cores. I also see that the upstream kernel still has the hooks for this in the board support files (for distributing the resources between the cores). Does anyone here know about the status about this dual-system support?
And wouldn't SMP also work on such CPUs, i.e. having one kernel instance with two cores? For the application in question SMP would make more sense (high data I/O traffic).
The MV78200 is not cache coherent, and therefore SMP is impossible on that processor. The best you can do is to partition the RAM and peripherals between the two cores and run two independent Linux systems side by side, one on each core. And then of course you'll need some mechanism for those Linux instances to communicate with each other for that setup to be useful.
Nicolas