Lanai, the mystery CPU architecture in LLVM

Re:Lanai, the mystery CPU architecture in LLVM by trasz on Monday March 21, 2022 @04:28PM (#30759288)

Random, tangentially related thing I just remembered: FreeBSD used to provide its own firmware for (iirc MIPS-like) core used in very early Broadcom NICs. There also used to be a custom firmware for some Adaptec controllers, along with an assembler tool to compile it during kernel build.

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Re:Lanai, the mystery CPU architecture in LLVM by drewg123 on Monday March 21, 2022 @05:34PM (#30759991)

I think you're talking about the Alteon Tigon-II NICs (Alteon was acquired by Broadcom). Ken Merry and I modified Alteon firmware so that it supported zero-copy sockets by doing page-flipping on receive.

See https://people.freebsd.org/~ken/zero_copy/

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Re:Lanai, the mystery CPU architecture in LLVM by p_l on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @12:21PM (#30768024)

All LSI "SCRIPTS" HBAs had firmware as part of kernel/driver sources among the many platforms they were used. I believe linux used a simple assembler whose sources were included in kernel to generate the binaries (if not preprocessor tricks, even). *BSDs definitely had their own solution too.

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