[fpc-devel] Bounty for MIPS

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Michael Schnell wrote:
> On 01/30/2012 01:48 PM, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
>> Michael Schnell wrote:
>>> IMHO, the MIPS port is interesting, too, as the NIOS CPU that is 
>>> available as soft core for Altera FPGA uses a very similar 
>>> instruction set and supposedly can be handled as a sub-arch.
>>>
>>> There is a very active community for NIOS-Linux that now provides a 
>>> quite decent MMU-enabled Linux port (including the necessary 
>>> Distribution generating Make-based tool chain).
>>>
>>> For quite some time I played with NIOS  using a "NEEK" Dev-Kit from 
>>> Altera. Nice stuff.

I remember mentioning NIOS as a MIPS variant in earlier discussion. Did 
you ever conclude just how close they were, i.e. could one backend 
target both?

>> Would you like to fill in a bit more detail on this in fpc-other?
>>
> As I'm not on fpc-other:
> 
> What would you like to know ?
> 
> Is there already an ongoing discussion on that ?
> 
> I stopped working on NIOS several  about a year ago and I'm just 
> monitoring some groups on same. So I don't think i can be very helpful 
> besides providing some pointers.

There were a couple of threads oriented towards hardware which were 
continued there since they were out of place in the more focussed MLs. 
Somebody specifically mentioned FPGAs in the context that he believed 
Wirth was tinkering with them, it would be interesting to have input 
from somebody who's actually used that technology e.g. to tell us why a 
high-level language such as Pascal can contribute.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

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