V8 for MIPS

by mm_mm • 14 years ago

26 20 14 years ago

jensnockert4• 14 years ago

It would be cool to see how well you could make a Godson-3A run JS, some of their instructions designed to help virtualization could help (I guess).

A bit random that this showed up today, was just thinking about MIPS. Partially SGI nostalgia, and partially about the new Loongson/Godson-3B chips and their fancy vector units.

justincormack3• 14 years ago

The 3A does not appear to be shipping yet, at least I cannot find any products. This http://www.lemote.com/products/computer/yilong/312.html is not yet available.

jensnockert4• 14 years ago

The 3A seems to be shipping in servers, but I don't think that you can buy them on the open market.

YesThatTom• 14 years ago

Why?

nknight• 14 years ago

Because MIPS needs a good, high-performance JavaScript engine?

jensnockert4• 14 years ago

Because there is a very significant amount of devices running MIPS processors, including a bit of upcoming Android stuff,.

bri3d3• 14 years ago

The Chinese are aggressively building new MIPS designs (called Loongsoon/Godson) and building them into hardware which is totally open (see RMS's Lemote Yeelong). Having a fast JS engine for MIPS could help these systems become more viable for those who aren't staunch Openness gurus like RMS.

There's also a large community of users of old SGI machines, and a few of them have a good amount of free time to pursue MIPS projects like this.

joe_bleau2• 14 years ago

Are schematics available? (A quick search didn't turn any up for me.) I don't think I'd call a product totally open without them.

_delirium• 14 years ago

> Having a fast JS engine for MIPS could help these systems become more viable

Yeah, the lack of a modern, reasonable-speed JS engine for PowerPC is what eventually forced me to ditch my old PowerBook laptop, about a year or two earlier than I would've otherwise felt the need to do so (the next bottleneck would've been its inability to take more than 1.25 GB of RAM, but the web growing unusably slow happened first). It makes a huge difference in the viability of a platform, if you plan to use the modern internet on it, to have a current-gen JS engine, rather than an old-style fallback interpreter.

bri3d3• 14 years ago

This will be interesting for the next generation of Loongson/Godson CPUs. Maybe the RMS approach of using Chinese Lemote Yeelong hardware driven by entirely open-source software will become more plausible for the rest of us.

paul99• 14 years ago

I updated my very stale project wiki page with current project status, including the fact that we do now support the Loongson processors.

We've been testing this on the Lemote Yeeloong notebook, which has a Loongson 2F cpu. So far we have not done any specific optimizations for the Loongson, just making it work, by avoiding some of the mips32-specific opcodes that are not supported.

hastur• 14 years ago

I'd be more interested in node.js (with V8) and mongodb on ARM.

justincormack3• 14 years ago

Appears people have node working, judging from the comments on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7483039/node-js-on-uclibc...

I havent tried it yet, but on todo list. Most stuff seems to be working, eg have redis working on arm.

The issue with javascript is that they do not support many architectures, other than interpreted only.

18pfsmt• 14 years ago

One could also get a PogoPlug4 for $100 right now, put Arch Linux Arm (ALARM) on an HDD, and then use the node.js package from the community ALARM repo.

http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv5/pogoplug-series-4

https://github.com/archlinuxarm/PKGBUILDs/tree/7e648426d9e73...

V8 for MIPS

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