[samlittlewood]

Fun fact - I wrote some customised firmware for the Tigon2 AceNIC ancestor I n this tale - (video stream offload). The original MIPS firmware solved the lack of mul/div ... by carefully writing code that never emitted those instructions. That caused a few head scratching moments!

Also, an interesting feature of this architecture was that it had no interrupt mechanism. There was a hardware ‘event’ bit register, and a special instruction to convert that it a ‘most important event’ offset into dispatch table. This made all race/concurrency issues go away - and the code was easy to reason about.