DeepBlue

Re “Crowd-funding $15M+ is a bit of a stretch”:

Plenty of projects and ventures have raised a
lot more than $15M. Check this list, it starts
just under $60M:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-funded_crowdfunding_projects

It does not sound plausible, let alone reasonable, that a
Mill plug-in for QEMU could require a prohibitive level of
effort. IMHO this is a junior year CS semester project for
one person. It is quite likely one or more of Mill’s many
fans would be happy to volunteer.

The argument QEMU is not “set up” for wide ISAs sounds
questionable. First, QEMU is open source and appopriate
support can be added if and where missing. Second, QEMU
has already been used to model and simulate wide ISAs
and interleaved execution by various projects in the
computer industry. One wonders why the Mill project
did not start with a QEMU emulator. It would have
saved time and effort versus building a complete
simulation environment from scratch.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 10 months ago by  DeepBlue.

How about a QEMU model plug-in?

“@deepblue I agree with Ivan that there are things that are
quite different that require brand new infrastructure to
emulate the Mill correctly. For one thing, all the wide
ISAs emulated so far are not really in the mainstream
qemu support. Support for the most mainstream of them,
Itanium, was dropped back in 2017. All the existing
platforms also assume a rather classical register file,
not a belt with configurable size and so on. So yes,
this is going to be a lot of work in my opinion, not
a student’s work for”.

The fact you are referring to the “official” list of
supported of ISAs supported by QEMU opens the question
if you have actually ever worked directly with QEMU code.
Did you pick this up from the Wikipedia? Keep in mind
many projects used QEMU internally as a scaffold and
never released any information to the general public.

FWIW I modified QEMU to emulate a vector architecture
many years ago. It was a piece of cake. QEMU code is
quite modular — big and small blocks can be swapped
in and out in pretty straightforward fashion.

How about crowdfunding and open sourcing the ISA?
Post RISC-V it will be difficult to find traction
without publishing the ISA.

The real value is not the textual ISA, but rather
the microarchitecture, which one would think is
protected by patents.

The industry is long past the stage when organic
growth was possible. To be successful the Mill
will either have to find one killer app, or to
support a broad application portfolio.