[erlang-questions] Erlang on RISC-V

Mikael Pettersson mikpelinux@REDACTED
Tue Feb 20 14:45:11 CET 2018


On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 11:49 AM, Matthias Lang <matthias@REDACTED> wrote:
> On 19. February 2018, Mikael Karlsson wrote:
>
>> has anyone looked at having the Erlang compiler support RISC-V,
>
> I haven't.
>
> What do you mean by "the Erlang compiler"?
>
> The regular Erlang compiler, i.e. the one that generates .beam files,
> generates .beam files which don't care what CPU you want to run on.
>
> HiPE is a different story, but you didn't mention HiPE.

RISC-V support in HiPE should be straight-forward, but no-one is
working on that AFAIK.
It's not clear there is any need, since the BEAM should work as-is.

There is also that HiPE/LLVM thing which might be able to support RISC-V
with less effort.

> Getting the VM to run is another task, though once people have linux
> and a toolchain running (I see that there's an active debian effort,
> for instance), I would expect that to be the same level of difficulty
> as compiling on, say, MIPS linux for the first time---i.e. maybe it'll
> just work, maybe you have to do a bit of autotools fiddling.

RISC-V has full GNU/Linux support with latest GCC, binutils, GLIBC,
and Linux kernel, and I know both Debian and Fedora have started ports.
But you don't need to wait for a full distro port, all you need is a
cross-compiler
and busybox or sth and you're done.

> The mention of RISC-V just made me think, "I haven't heard anything
> about Tilera for a while". I think it's been a few years since anyone
> here said anything about it on the mailing list. Anyone know if it's
> still alive?

Tilera is dropping their Tile processors and migrating to some other core
(I don't know which one, but probably ARM or MIPS.)  See e.g. their recent
announcements to drop the older TilePro from Linux and glibc, keeping only
Tile-Gx due to some customers still using it.



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