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Parallella ideas

PostPosted: Sat May 21, 2016 2:03 am
by Olaf
The current concept is to use Parallella as some PC that boots up Linux and the use the FGPA and epiphany processor to speed up processing.
As a general solution this seems logical.

Today I have been learning to create your OS from scratch. (x86 code, so I am still at loss how you do that in RISC) but I think it would be similar.
Technically a boots sector is 512 bytes in size with the magic last 2 bytes that is "55AA". In the case of a x86 processor the BIOS has the INT xx functionality that gives you access to the hardware (brute force)

I have been thinking of creating your own Parallella OS specialized for that one specialized job. No Linux that slows you down or eats up memory.
I know that this is of course hard to do but I am thinking about some tool that automatically generates the SD card image and uploads it.

In the end you could have one master parallella board that have parallella slaves and uploads jobs to its slaves that have full raw bare metal processing without the slowing down of Linux.

Re: Parallella ideas

PostPosted: Sat May 21, 2016 1:28 pm
by dobkeratops
bear in mind the epiphany e-cores (which should be the bulk of the boards floating-point power) already don't have linux on them - they basically are 'bare metal accelerators'; you might as well keep the OS on the ARM because it's there for dealing with all that (network, files etc)..

People do have issues with linux for realtime control .. I think there's already variations where you can use one of the ARM cores in bare metal?