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(Mill team)

We started with 6 planned talks; it has since grown to 9, and shows no signs of stopping there :)

So if you have a subject you want us to explain, or you want to invite us to give a talk at your uni or workplace (no promises!), please just ask (here or on the Mill forums http://millcomputing.com/forum/the-mill/ or mail me: will at mill computing dot com)




So I think all fans of the talks would really love to have a little Mill CPU of their own to play with for some hacking project.

I imagine high prices due to economies of scale will be a problem in the beginning, but if we think longer term and assume you guys overcome that initial hurdle, any dreams of incorporating the Mill into a platform like Raspberry Pi or Arduino?


We fully expect dev boards to be available, although hopefully you'll be able to buy high-end Mill chips too.


One subject which would be interesting would be the changes needed to Linux and to Linux SW to make them work efficiently on the Mill with its unified address space.

I'm thinking about COW fork, mmap where I don't find it obvious on how it would work on the mill..

Also are there features on the Mill which are designed to make GCs work more efficiently?


Excellent feedback! Yes and yes, we will do this type of talk and explain fork() :)


How big is the Mill team, by the way?


Any chance you could also update the slides as PDFs in addition to all the videos, and maybe even PDF document/HTML versions of the same information in textual form? Some of us prefer reading stuff to watching a talk.



Yup, looks great. Thanks!


I'm really surprised that Ivan is both a great engineer and a great speaker.

Probably because "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."

I'm waiting for boards with your CPU. I really want to port some software on it.


> Probably because "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."

People consider different things as simple. For example I often consider very abstract mathematics as very easy to understand (since I always thought in a rather abstract way - thus this kind of explanation is very natural for me), while most people consider my kind of explaining things as "unnecessary complicated".

Don't tell me that I haven't understood the topic. When talking about topics that I understood worse, I often tend to give much simpler (and better understandable for "ordinary people") explanations, since I haven't understood the complex connections and thus I'm unable to give a much "simpler" (in my terms; "more complicated" in terms of most people) explanation.


It would be really nice to have a Mill simulator, perhaps running on a web page.


Unfortunately, a simulator running in javascript—and that's what you're suggesting, one way or the other—would run so amazingly slowly that it would be completely useless. Especially one which is, if I understood the latest talk correctly, sub-cycle accurate.

(To give you an idea, I think I recall Ivan saying that their simulator takes/would take 1 week to boot linux—and that's in c!)


We have x86 simulator in JS: http://bellard.org/jslinux/ It's slow but usable. With ISA specification someone could make Mill version.

I'm sure that their simulator comprises some debug tools. That's why it's so slow.


Ah, good call. I was thinking of the sort of low-level simulator you'd want to play around with an unfamiliar architecture; but as the technical notes on that link say, no single-stepping. Once you want to actually be able to slow things down enough to watch a system run, then it's typically harder to speed them up again, unless you truly have two separate emulation modes which can switch off. It's doable.




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