Re: Transmeta ;)

[Al Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

On Thu, 20 Jan 2000, Alastair Donlon wrote:

> There is a reason for the code to be in ROM - it's the first thing that
> runs when the processor is switched on. Before the BIOS even. Doesn't
> mean that it has to stay in ROM, in fact it's copied to memory for
> exactly the performance reasons you mention.

Yes ;)

> >From my understanding, the OS doesn't even _see_ the morphing software.
> At boot, the OS still only talks to the BIOS. Mobile Linux is just a
> version of Linux with a small memory footprint and good power management.

Hmm, not sure about this. I *believe* Linux *does* talk to the code
morphing software during the boot process. It does this for several
reasons, one of them being I don't think you can flash the ROM at just any
stage. I'm not sure how this process works, but I remember reading
somewhere that Linux 'switches off' talking to the morphing code at some
point during boot strap. Of course, I could have imagined it all ;)

> Both the translation cache and the morph code reside in a seperate
> region of memory which is inaccessible to x86 (and, I suppose, all
> source) code. I haven't seen anything about there being a direct
> interface to the morph code other than through flash'ing the
> ROM chip.