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Altera_Forum
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15 years ago

SMP support in the Linux System with Nios2

Hello all! I'm studying a multicore Nios2 system for my thesis. After trying with several applications to understand the function of mutex and mailbox, I decided to use also an operative sys...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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15 years ago

Linux for NIOS does not support SMP and due to the not exiting cache synchronization features of the NIOS CPU (and some other issues) it's impossible to create a decent SMP system with this CPU.

Of course you can use multiple independent CPUs that don't share memory regions on an Avalon bus. You need to use dedicated "hardware" to allow communication between the CPUs (e.g. FiFos or explicitly not-cached memory regions protected by additional hardware semaphores)

-Michael