I was pretty late last year in posting http://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2020/05/recovery-tech-talks-23-or.html in order to maintain this ritual. It's OK to be late but I cannot really make up by being early in 2021 since there is no guarantee that will be employed on the anniversary date, of course.
As such, here's the anniversary year 24 edition. It features rolling into upcoming year, which may culminate in the '25' edition of this posting. Either way, I hope to have a "Anniversary^10 and 25 years" post.
I have definitely learned many things in the past past couple of decades, including how to take criticism, whether code & spec review or paper and patent feedback. It's tough sometimes but feedback provides one of the key ways to grow. There is always room to learn, too. Thanks to Hot, via Rob, for recent reference https://www.amazon.com/12-Essential-Skills-Software-Architects/dp/0321717295. I especially like the quote "Architecture is about business. It focuses on representing, communicating, and building on the key points of a technology or even a nontechnology solution that has beneficial impact to the business in some way."
Beyond keeping up with the times via feedback and book learning, I sometimes like to ponder the basics in this fast moving technology world. The basics include maths, science, and for computers. Vintage computer topics include the EDVAC http://web.mit.edu/STS.035/www/PDFs/edvac.pdf. This led me to think about pointer sizes. I started my career programming 8-bit 8051's with its infamous 16-bit 'DPTR' and Harvard Architecture. Then I moved to the 16-bit 186, 16-bit V20 286, 32-bit 386EX & 486 from Intel, 29k from AMD, and Pentium Pro. Then I segued to 64-bit with Itanium here at Intel where I on-boarded to lead some of the boot firmware development, and then EM64T/x64/x86_64 to provide the first EFI boot. But what about 128-bit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/128-bit_computing ?
My journey into the past led to some questions about the integer and pointer size of the Unisys 1100 (72 bit ptr, 576 bit integer?) mentioned in https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/~mccann/cstyle.html. GCC has a data type https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/_005f_005fint128.html. Maybe a future ILP128/LP128 to scale beyond today's ILP64/LP64 http://archive.opengroup.org/public/tech/aspen/lp64_wp.htm?
The C style document mentions DEC, which reminded me of some of the innovation they, as chronicled at http://simh.trailing-edge.com/dsarchive.html. During my undergraduate days at Cornell Digital was to place to go for systems work, and at Intel in the late 90's many ex-DEC engineers led the workstation work (e.g., Dileep B.).
Intel has been evolving physical addresses, too 5-level paging on Intel x86 https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/managed/2b/80/5-level_paging_white_paper.pdf.
Most interesting regarding deployed systems is the AS/400 single level store w/ 64 or 128 bit pointers. I ran into this while reading 'inside the as/400' https://www.amazon.com/Inside-AS-400-Frank-Soltis/dp/1882419669 book, Some CPU's have 96-bit physical addresses with the size hidden by the SLIC - system level interface code. IBM also has 80 bit VA and 64-bit PA on IBM https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_aix_71/generalprogramming/address_space.html.
These pointer size ruminations led me to think of the more recent paper on the subject, namely the RISC-V paper and the architecture's support of 128 bit addressing. From https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~krste/papers/EECS-2016-1.pdf:
"At the historic growth rate of the memory capacity of TOP500 champions, about 70% per year, a 64-bit address space would be exhausted in about two decades. To the extent that global addressability of such systems is desired, we contend that flat addressability is the best approach; RV128I provides a promising solution."
Andrew W. mentioned that the 128 bit binding was considering something of a joke when he described it at the 2016 coreboot conference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0ykeMmqglI&feature=youtu.be (12:25).
In the intervening 5 years, though, the 'joke' takes on some more gravity with the comment about needing to work on the base spec for 128 bits (minute 3:58 of https://www.youtube.com/watch?utm_content=152341011&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin&hss_channel=lcp-7579420&v=lg33UqZ_en0&feature=youtu.be)
There are no known soft or hard core IP implementations of RV128 I could find on the web, although the https://bellard.org/tinyemu/ RISC-V system emulator supports the RV128IMAFDQC base ISA (user level ISA version 2.2, privileged architecture version 1.10).
But extra bits do not have to be used for addressing. There are potential security usages https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Tue1554-xbgas-JLEIDEL.pdf, or more fringe ideas like mapping ipv6 address to memory locations https://patents.google.com/patent/US8266238.
Again, these are 128 bit pointers, not 128 bit data types. A lot of the SIMD/Vector ISA extensions have broken the 128 bit data type long ago. This is a "sizeof (pointer_in_128_bit_ISA) == 128" thing.
Speaking of RISC-V, I was interested to see the progress in the EDK2 RISC-V port https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/firmware_uor/. Some of this work was inspired after my posting http://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2014/11/porting-to-new-architecture.html which led to position papers https://github.com/vincentjzimmer/Documents/blob/master/risc-v-uefi-talk-001.pdf https://github.com/vincentjzimmer/Documents/blob/master/risc-v-uefi-talk-004.pdf and standards/open source work.
I asked the Fosdem developer if he had considered porting the UEFI Platform Initialization (PI) Management Mode (MM) to the System Binary Interface (SBI) https://github.com/riscv/opensbi machine mode. This is work we did https://github.com/vincentjzimmer/Documents/blob/master/A_Tour_Beyond_BIOS_Launching_Standalone_SMM_Drivers_in_PEI_using_the_EFI_Developer_Kit_II.pdf
in order to allow decoupling the SMM from the host firmware environment https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/tree/master/StandaloneMmPkg was originally done for loading SMM from the Firmware Support Package (FSP) with a prototype at https://github.com/universalpayload/fspsdk/tree/qemu_fsp_x64_smm. The work was then picked up by the ARM community who need to load the TrustZone-variant of MM during early boot (e.g., SEC or PEI). The architecture neutrality of MM software model could thus be applied to RISC-V, just as the original "SMM Framework" mentioned "xMI's" to cover by the x86 system management interrupt (SMI) on x86 and the platform management interrupt (PMI) on Itanium.
Today, though, SBI is really a set of call interfaces similar to the DEC Alpha PALcode or Itanium SAL/PAL Code. I mention both PAL and SAL from Itanium since some of the SBI are SOC-specific (e.g., ISA emulation) whereas others may map to the platform (e.g., debug console). The runtime of host firmware is always challenging, whether it's traditional SMM on x64 and UEFI runtime and the interpreted ACPI, or the IBM Opal runtime or device tree. As always the execution of runtime should be minimized in order to avoid impacting host OS / hypervisor resource management, with 'minion cores', Embedded Controllers, BMC's, and other SOC microcontrollers providing independent execution regimes.
