[virtmach] Transmeta Crusoe

[Peter William Lount]

Hi,

>From what I've heard and read Transmeta will not be opening up the
internals of their VLIW CPUs to outsiders. They say that there will be only
one program that runs on one of their cpus and that's the code morphing
stuff and that it locks down external access to the cpu while booting. This
means that until they do there is no way to access the insides. (Sounds
like a call to action for hackers to find a way). They say that they are
keeping it internal because they don't want to have to support "legacy" for
their own chips and that x86 legacy is bad enough... ;--).

Unfortunately their two chips use different Code Morphing Software that is
incompatible with each other! Two seperate versions as the VLIW CPUs are
actually different. By not opening the internals they have tremendous
flexibility to change how it works without people screaming at them. Good
for innovation on their part.

It's also interesting to note that they have an awesome opportunity to
provide "low level debugging" tools for Operating System and Virtual
Machine authors. Linus said that it's great for programming Linux with
because of the debugging environment they have constructed internally!
However, it won't be released. Lets get them to release it!

All the best,

Peter William Lount
peter@smalltalk.org
http://www.smalltalk.org


>From: Stephan Rudlof <stephan.rudlof@ipk.fhg.de>
>Talking about building VMs on the 'Crusoe' from Transmeta could be an
>interesting theme here. But therefore we need deeper informations about
the
>'code morphing' software...