Testing Linux modules for ARM64
A Call to ARMs
Twenty years ago Linux was ported to a 64-bit RISC processor. Now the challenge is to put GNU/Linux on modern 64-bit ARM processors.
It has been 21 years since I first met Linux Torvalds in May 1994 and 20 years since the first DEC Alpha [1] port of GNU/Linux hit the streets in late 1995. At that time the Alpha was the fastest microprocessor in the world and the first 64-bit RISC processor that Linus supported with his source code tree. I was proud of how fast that processor ran GNU/Linux, and just to prove it was a real 64-bit port, Linus did an mmap of huge amounts of virtual memory, much more than a 32-bit system could support in one image.
Still, 20 years is a long time, and when you look back at the Alpha in light of today's processors it is relatively slow, running at clock speeds of 300-400MHz and using so much electricity that when we put one of the chips in a laptop, it gave one Navy Admiral who was wearing his summer white shorts third-degree burns on his knees … true story!
All of this reflects back to the performance contest [2] that Linaro has been sponsoring for the past year and two new events that made the performance contest easier to enter and win. The contest was originally conceived to test and port 1,400 software modules that contained assembly language to ARM's new 64-bit architecture.
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