| --- Log opened Tue Jan 28 00:00:13 2014 | ||
| stekern | someone is giving the ethmac Linux driver some TLC: http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1401.3/00871.html | 08:21 |
|---|---|---|
| jonibo | there's always been a lot of acitvity in the ethmac driver | 08:53 |
| jonibo | it's used by many others outside of openrisc | 08:53 |
| jonibo | nios and microblaze systems (avalon bus) use it a lot | 08:54 |
| jonibo | and now xtensa, apparenlty, too | 08:54 |
| jonibo | xtensa, fwiw, reminds me a lot of openrisc | 08:54 |
| stekern | yeah, it really shows how something technically inferior can gain success with the right software support | 08:59 |
| stekern | but that patch set (or the one after the review comments are fixed) should fix some of the issues maxpaln had | 09:01 |
| maxpaln | Yep, I was just looking at that - I'll be interested to see how the disabling of GbE advertisement has been achieved. | 09:12 |
| maxpaln | Now i have the datasheet for the PHY on our board I was expecting this to be a register setting in the autonegotiation routine - but maybe there's a more generic way to solve the problem. | 09:13 |
| jonibo | stekern: which bit is technically inferior? ethmac or xtensa? | 09:20 |
| jonibo | if ethmac, what's superior? | 09:20 |
| stekern | jonibo: ethmac, it has it fair share of issues on rtl level. there are probably several open source MAC implementations out there that are superior, but they lack upstream support in Linux and the ethmac works "well enough". | 09:26 |
| jonibo | ok... interesting | 09:26 |
| jonibo | easy enough to get support upstream for another driver if there's a better core to use | 09:26 |
| jonibo | jsut a matter of writing the driver :) | 09:26 |
| stekern | I know, but the "working well enough" is the barrier for that ;) | 09:27 |
| jonibo | this is a good TODO for an openrisc newbie... add it to the wiki... point them at a better core and ask for a driver | 09:27 |
| jonibo | yeah, I know | 09:27 |
| stekern | another approach is of course fixing up the issues in the ethmac core, which isn't neither a huge task | 09:28 |
| stekern | the biggest problem is related to clock domain crossings | 09:28 |
| jonibo | aha... sounds interesting | 09:29 |
| Powermaniac | Anyone online willing to answer some hopefully not too stupid questions regarding OpenRisc for me? Main question being: Is OpenRISC a completely new architecture or is it slightly based on something like ARM? And if it was manufactured would it be like a microprocessor or a system on a chip or an embedded CPU or workstation/server CPU, or mini mainframe CPU etc? | 10:59 |
| doomlord_ | its custom, new i think, when i asked | 11:00 |
| Powermaniac | (Just going by the list of cpu architectures on wikipedia) | 11:00 |
| doomlord_ | its not compatible with anything else | 11:00 |
| doomlord_ | i get the impression the people behind it want the experience of designing an ISA | 11:00 |
| Powermaniac | Oh okay | 11:01 |
| doomlord_ | i would have thought you could make it a superset of some other existing machine and get more traction | 11:01 |
| doomlord_ | but there's NIH :) | 11:01 |
| doomlord_ | i'm always guilty of NIH myself, i can sympathise | 11:01 |
| Powermaniac | Well wouldn't it become closed source then? | 11:01 |
| Powermaniac | NIH? | 11:01 |
| doomlord_ | Not Invented Here | 11:02 |
| doomlord_ | = urge to re-invent everything | 11:02 |
| Powermaniac | Ahh okay | 11:02 |
| doomlord_ | i think you can make things binary compatible, but stealing actual designs is a whole different kettle of fish | 11:02 |
| Powermaniac | Yeah I have that same feeling with a project I'm wanting/actually working on at the moment on and off | 11:03 |
| Powermaniac | The urge to re-invent things that is | 11:03 |
| Powermaniac | Well the only reason you would want to make something binary compatible would be for software compatibility, no? | 11:03 |
| doomlord_ | its like a fundemental problem in nature | 11:03 |
| doomlord_ | the thing is , often the only way to truly know something is to build it yourself | 11:04 |
| doomlord_ | let alone actual ownership, there's a sense of "intellectual" ownership | 11:04 |
| doomlord_ | and its a huge part of any engineers motivation to create something that is 'theirs' | 11:04 |
| Powermaniac | Which if it is aiming at the open source crowd is not too much of a problem if it isn't binary compatible as you can just get C running on it and compile most things from source. | 11:04 |
| Powermaniac | Interesting | 11:05 |
| doomlord_ | yeah if they make a custom ISA, they need to make support in compilers... | 11:05 |
| doomlord_ | i dealt with a few risc ISAs in games over the years | 11:05 |
| doomlord_ | mips, powerpc, hitachi sh-series | 11:06 |
| doomlord_ | not actually done much with arm directly myself | 11:06 |
| Powermaniac | I have to wonder if a company like Freescale offered the guys here or a similar company to work with them and manufacture OpenRISC if they would do it... | 11:06 |
| doomlord_ | like whats the point of another risc isa, why not just clone one of those | 11:06 |
| doomlord_ | but make an opensource implementation, and maybe have some custom extra instructions | 11:06 |
| Powermaniac | I just like the openness of it all, if that was the only reason they chose to do it this way, that seems like a good enough reason to me | 11:07 |
| doomlord_ | heh. next up: open CPU foundry | 11:07 |
| doomlord_ | well china have cloned MIPS, and i dont think anyone can sue them over it | 11:07 |
| Powermaniac | Well from what I understand with ARM they license it so you can't actually make an ARM open source processor | 11:07 |
| doomlord_ | ok thats a big shame | 11:07 |
| Powermaniac | Haha China doesn't seem to give a shit xD | 11:07 |
| doomlord_ | one project that looked interesting to me was a modernday motorola 68k series | 11:08 |
| doomlord_ | but it was closed source | 11:08 |
| Powermaniac | Hmm okay | 11:08 |
| doomlord_ | (but thats not risc) | 11:08 |
| doomlord_ | i liked mips | 11:09 |
| doomlord_ | powervr are resurrecting it for an soc | 11:10 |
| Powermaniac | I'm sort of new to the whole electronics and actual CPU architecture scene so... | 11:10 |
| Powermaniac | Although I've always been rather big into everyday user computer hardware | 11:10 |
| doomlord_ | i caught the tail end of the era in which games involved more asm | 11:10 |
| doomlord_ | bits of engine code had to be done in asm, knowing all the pipeline hazards etc | 11:11 |
| Powermaniac | Oh okay, cool. I've read a lot about how people used to edit games and program there own games as they were in asm | 11:11 |
| Powermaniac | Or well it came with how to code the asm code for the game and you had to manually type in the instructions | 11:12 |
| doomlord_ | C plus "intrinsics" has drastically reduced the amount of asm the world needs | 11:12 |
| doomlord_ | eg they usually give a customized c compiler with intrinsic functions that represent any special instructions the machine has (like fancy vector arithmetic or cache control) | 11:13 |
| Powermaniac | Well C does seem easier then asm which I guess is a plus(?) | 11:13 |
| doomlord_ | yeah ancient 8bit games were exclusively asm | 11:13 |
| doomlord_ | yes C has a special sweetspot | 11:13 |
| doomlord_ | low level enough to reduce the need for asm, but high level enough to be tolerable to write serious programs and portable | 11:13 |
| Powermaniac | Just been learning C recently, so yeah...Not sure where I was going to go with that now I think about it xD | 11:14 |
| doomlord_ | C started being used in the 16bit era, but that was still a crossover; by 32bits, C was ubiquitous | 11:14 |
| Powermaniac | Would you happen to know if OpenRISC is 32 bits or 64 bits or 16 etc.? | 11:14 |
| doomlord_ | no idea | 11:14 |
| doomlord_ | i dont know much about it | 11:14 |
| Powermaniac | Okay | 11:15 |
| doomlord_ | its "an interesting thing" but low down on my list | 11:15 |
| doomlord_ | i wish i had time for everything | 11:15 |
| Powermaniac | I'm planning hopefully on sourcing an Altera FPGA to try and build an 'open source' computer with the ORPSoCv3 | 11:16 |
| doomlord_ | wow, nice | 11:16 |
| Powermaniac | Ha yeah I know that feeling re: having time for everything | 11:16 |
| Powermaniac | Although if I get into uni this year I will probably be using a Xilinx FPGA at uni... | 11:17 |
| Powermaniac | Considering what the guys here were saying about Xilinx I'm not sure how the uni is going to deal with the new developments of the free software not having the old features | 11:17 |
| Powermaniac | Something about it changed recently and thus Xilinx is best to avoid at the moment | 11:17 |
| Powermaniac | But the uni just bought a whole stack of new Xilinx FPGA boards | 11:18 |
| Powermaniac | The Zedboard | 11:18 |
| doomlord_ | i've never messed with fpga | 11:19 |
| doomlord_ | i suppose they might be good at things like neural nets | 11:19 |
| olofk_ | doomlord_, Powermaniac: OpenRISC is loosely based on MIPS-I and DLX | 11:19 |
| Powermaniac | Well I've sort of have. Was watching other uni students implement some basic features, it was a counter that had made...So nothing fancy | 11:19 |
| Powermaniac | olofk_: Thanks! | 11:20 |
| Powermaniac | It is currently a single core processor right? | 11:20 |
| olofk_ | Powermaniac: You can put as many cores as you can fit in an ASIC or FPGA :) | 11:20 |
| Powermaniac | Oh okay cool | 11:21 |
| olofk_ | But there is no real system for interconnecting the cores, so basically that would be come a shitload of single cores | 11:21 |
| Powermaniac | So is anything holding it back speed wise, like if I were to use it as a CPU what year x86 processor would you say it compares to? | 11:21 |
| olofk_ | And it has been manyfactured a lot of times over the last ten to fifteen years | 11:21 |
| Powermaniac | Yeah I remember seeing Samsung had implemented an OpenRISC well one of you guys told me about it and I went hunting for it | 11:22 |
| olofk_ | It's in Zigbee ASICs, in Samsung Digital TVs, in telecom equipment, in some of the Allwinner SoCs for tablets and other places | 11:22 |
| olofk_ | The wikipedia lists a few of them http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenRISC | 11:23 |
| Powermaniac | Wow one was on the ISS that is pretty cool | 11:24 |
| olofk_ | ISS? Where did you see that? | 11:25 |
| Powermaniac | The wiki | 11:25 |
| olofk_ | ahh.. the techedsat | 11:25 |
| olofk_ | I didn't know that one was on ISS | 11:25 |
| Powermaniac | olofk_: So you still don't really recommend Xilinx FPGAs right? | 11:26 |
| maxpaln | Hopefully not the inspiration for Gravity :-P | 11:26 |
| Powermaniac | As I still need to look around to find a source here in Australia for Terasic FPGA boards | 11:26 |
| olofk_ | Powermaniac: I recommend Altera FPGAs over the competitors (sorry maxpaln) because that toolchain is currently best supported | 11:27 |
| Powermaniac | Ahh yeah I thought so | 11:27 |
| maxpaln | that's ok - we're new to the OPENRisc thing | 11:27 |
| olofk_ | I've started working on Xilinx support for ORPSoCv3 however, and it's not a very big task, so don't let that discourage you | 11:27 |
| olofk_ | and we will soon have excellent Lattice support too ;) | 11:27 |
| Powermaniac | Oh so I could get a Atlys FPGA? | 11:27 |
| maxpaln | :-) of course! | 11:28 |
| Powermaniac | Sweet! | 11:28 |
| maxpaln | as an open source solution porting to different FPGA architectures isn't a massive task - supporting the peripheral set on a specific board is the bigger task but still manageable | 11:29 |
| Powermaniac | maxpaln: Do you ahve some connection to Xilinx? | 11:29 |
| olofk_ | The first OpenRISC board we made at ORSoC had an Atlys FPGA, so it was quite well supported in ORPSoCv2, but the toolchain was a pain to work with and we haven't seen any renewed interest in support for Atlys | 11:29 |
| olofk_ | (or MicroSemi as they are called now) | 11:29 |
| olofk_ | The OpenRISC in space runs on an Atlys FPGA, btw | 11:30 |
| maxpaln | it's probably one of the biggest advantages of the solution - you aren't forced to follow one set of devices. you can choose any FPGA vendor, an ASIC etc. | 11:30 |
| maxpaln | and the SW shouldn't need to change when the HW is retargeted (although I don't have any first hand experience of this so I'll let the other guys confirm!) | 11:31 |
| olofk_ | maxpaln: Yes, that's probably the biggest benefit for consumers of these cores, and one of the prime targets for ORPSoCv3 is to hopefully make it even easier to move between targets | 11:31 |
| Powermaniac | Now I just need to remember if the Atlys board had all the features I wanted to make an open source computer | 11:31 |
| olofk_ | Powermaniac: Probably not :) | 11:31 |
| olofk_ | Powermaniac: But please send a link if you need some second opinion | 11:32 |
| maxpaln | Not wanting to promote the compeition but that Altera board looked pretty well kitted out with peripherals - it might be a better bet | 11:32 |
| Powermaniac | maxpaln: Yeah just sourcing Altera boards here seems to be a pain | 11:33 |
| Powermaniac | Well that also have academic pricing* | 11:33 |
| maxpaln | ah, well you're dealing with a big company - I have no idea what provision they make for one of purchases. Don't they have an online store or something | 11:33 |
| maxpaln | ah, of course - educational discounts are worth a lot :-) | 11:33 |
| Powermaniac | well that is new the DE1-SoC Board | 11:34 |
| Powermaniac | There was some issue with the USB ports if I remember correctly on both the DE2-115 and Atlys boards that may make my plan difficult | 11:38 |
| Powermaniac | Something about them not being a traditional USB port that can accept both data in and out | 11:39 |
| Powermaniac | Oh seeing as BlueCmd isn't here do you guys know whether I only need to update to Debian Unstable/Testing to get the kernal upgrade to run the qemu-or32? | 11:42 |
| stekern | olofk_: now you're mixing up the terms, Actel FPGA, not atlys | 11:45 |
| stekern | =) | 11:45 |
| olofk_ | oh... sorry | 11:46 |
| stekern | see what happens when I leave for lunch and stop watching you guys, you have filled several pages of irc logs =) | 11:46 |
| olofk_ | haha | 11:46 |
| Powermaniac | Ha | 11:47 |
| olofk_ | And you need to clean up the mess that we left :) | 11:47 |
| stekern | yup ;) | 11:52 |
| stekern | doomlord_: "new" is relative, the openrisc 1000 ISA is soon to be about 15 years | 11:54 |
| olofk_ | oh god. I now see the confusion that I have created :) | 11:54 |
| Powermaniac | What do you guys think of the Nexys 4? | 11:55 |
| olofk_ | Arithmetics in FPGA is a fucking pain! | 13:40 |
| olofk_ | i.e. I suck at it | 13:41 |
| blueCmd | stupid timezones | 14:32 |
| blueCmd | woke up at 4 AM fully rested | 14:32 |
| olofk_ | :) | 14:33 |
| blueCmd | olofk_: how do you want the rebased binutils sources? | 14:35 |
| maxpaln | I am bout to start the job I have been putting off for ages :-) I am about reimplement the wishbone interface to the DDR3 module based on the DDR2 interface that is part of the Xilinx Spartan Board code | 14:48 |
| maxpaln | wish me luck! | 14:48 |
| blueCmd | glhf :) | 14:49 |
| maxpaln | thnx | 14:49 |
| blueCmd | olofk_: https://github.com/bluecmd/or1k-debian/tree/master/sources | 14:57 |
| blueCmd | *-changed contains the full files after they have been patched and what not, the patches can be found in debian/patches after running dpkg-sources -x on the .dsc file. | 14:57 |
| blueCmd | combined changelogs are provided for easy 'grep for filenamoutput all authors' | 14:58 |
| blueCmd | my internet is quickly deteriorating since everybody seems to be waking up at the hotel | 14:58 |
| olofk_ | maxpaln: You can also take a look at the wb_sdram_ctrl test bench. It reads, writes and verifies a lot of data with my wishbone BFMs | 14:59 |
| maxpaln | olofk_: thanks - that could be useful | 15:00 |
| olofk_ | blueCmd: Great. This should be a good starting point for anyone who wants to analyze who made the OpenRISC-specific changes | 15:01 |
| blueCmd | olofk_: I thought you were the 'anyone' in this case ;) | 15:36 |
| blueCmd | i'll start a google doc and let people fill in and we can get the ball rolling | 15:37 |
| blueCmd | jeremybennett: do you have any idea what kind of release statement we would need from the code authors? | 15:37 |
| blueCmd | do we need to do lawyers and stuff? | 15:37 |
| stekern | blueCmd: the way I have understood it, each one would need to sign a copyright assignment form to FSF | 15:40 |
| stekern | I think you can get the assignment form by sending a request to this address: copyright-clerk@fsf.org | 15:42 |
| stekern | but I have no hard facts, jeremybennett probably knows better | 15:42 |
| blueCmd | let's hope itt can be digitally signed | 15:45 |
| olofk_ | blueCmd: I took a quick look at the files and quite a lot of the stuff is autogenerated or trivial makefile changes | 15:46 |
| olofk_ | Would it be ok to just go by the author names in the source files, or do we need to track down the commits? | 15:47 |
| blueCmd | olofk_: the ocmmits | 15:48 |
| olofk_ | ah crap | 15:48 |
| blueCmd | but the changelog should be good for that I think | 15:48 |
| olofk_ | Is that trustworthy? | 15:48 |
| olofk_ | I'm worried about having to track git->svn->cvs otherwise | 15:49 |
| blueCmd | I think we have been pretty anal about having people write in the changelog | 15:50 |
| blueCmd | we don't need everyone to sign for each commit, we only need to find out who comitted | 15:50 |
| olofk_ | I tried to do a proper release 3 of or1200. That commit log was anything but clean | 15:50 |
| blueCmd | (and preferably comitted stuff we actually use) | 15:50 |
| olofk_ | I found Johan Rydberg, Julius Baxter, Jeremy Bennett and Peter Gavin from just looking at a few files. Anyone familiar with the first guy? | 15:52 |
| olofk_ | Or is his stuff already in binutils? Have to make some diffs | 15:57 |
| blueCmd | the stuff already in binutils is probably all outdated, but that would mean that he has signed the thing I guess | 15:58 |
| stekern | olofk_: johan rydberg wrote what's already upstream, nothing after that | 17:20 |
| stekern | and I can't recall jeremy touching anything in or1k binutils, but gdb and newlib, but I can remember wrong and not that it matters | 17:50 |
| ams | olofk: help! | 17:55 |
| ams | juliusb: help! | 17:55 |
| ams | olofk, juliusb, I need an FPGA for some retro mini-computer hackery... More exactly, either a CADR running on a FPGA, or something Ivory like. ... what each of those are -- Lisp says it all. | 17:59 |
| stekern | ams: almost any of the half decent to decent fpga devboards are probably sufficient for that | 18:58 |
| olofk | ams: Do you have any experience with FSF copyright assignments? We're looking to do a serious attempt of upstreaming binutils | 22:21 |
| olofk | But we don't like GPL, so we want to use MS-PL instead, but I guess that shouldn't be any problems | 22:23 |
| stekern | I don't understand why people go on about Linux booting quickly, it took me a month to boot this: http://asciinema.org/a/7403 | 22:49 |
| --- Log closed Wed Jan 29 00:00:15 2014 | ||
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