[Libre-soc-dev] Introduction

[lkcl]

On September 9, 2021 8:11:50 PM UTC, Andrey Miroshnikov <andrey at technepisteme.xyz> wrote:
>Hello everyone,
>
>My name's Andrey and I'm based in the UK. I'm currently self-employed 
>(building up my company, Scutum Electrum Ltd).

nice. i'm in tiptree at the moment.

>I've been aware of both EOMA-68 and Libre-SOC since late 2019, however 
>my job at the time had a fairly restrictive IP clause (essentially 
>anything I developed, even outside of work hours, would legally belong 
>to the company). Didn't want to take the chances.

makes sense

> Now that I'm not
>under 
>a restrictive contract anymore, I'd like to join your team, as I agree 
>with the goal (honestly can't believe that there are no SoCs with fully
>
>open-source drivers, of course mobile modems are even worse).

what's particularly bad is the consequences: 50 % of the world's smartphones with a major vulnerability, because qualcomm couldn't be bothered.

> Re-read 
>the charter and I agree with its terms (very straightforward and to
>0the 
>point).

you like the dilbert cartoons? :)

>Been looking at the mailing lists from Jul to Dec 2019, and let the 
>unread emails pile up and got burned out pretty quick (not gonna repeat
>
>that mistake, now I catch up daily hahaha). Only re-subscribed last
>week.

yeh there's a lot going on

>Although my degree is in electronic engineering (graduated in 2019),
>for 
>the last year and a half I've been looking into programming language 
>grammar. It's a fascinating topic, here's a fun learning series where 
>you build a Pascal interpreter in Python: 
>https://ruslanspivak.com/lsbasi-part1/.

nice! like it. very funny, and informative.  i did a pascal compiler 3rd year, in modula-2, target machine was a 68,000.

>My last job was in system validation, where we tested our company's
>chip 
>design (the digital part of it) on an FPGA emulator by writing a great 
>set of test cases. 

funny that's exactly what we had to do.


>Just saw bug #22 and I guess you already have something similar to the 
>emulator that I described. 

yyep.  nmigen has a built-in gate-level simulator, and we have extracted the pseudocode from the Power ISA, made it executable, wrote a compiler, and run co-simulations step by step.

kyle who also just joined is abstracting out the two so that we can add other cross-emulation "things" and then run any-against-any... *and* also then compare against a blatch of expected results.

if you'd like to help with that, perhaps starting with making qemu "talk" the same API that kyle's doing, that would be really useful.

> Very, very cool, congrats on the first boot!

: 

>For the Libre-SOC project I'd like to do a bit of everything, so for
>now 
>I'll just setup the environment, look at the current bugs, and see what
>
>hasn't been fixed yet.

ok

> Today while installing the dependencies I
>noticed 
>a Debian package in the HDL Workflow wiki page that must've changed 
>names (python-nosetest3 now called python3-nose), so I could start with
>
>that once I create an account.

it's publicly editable. but if you send me an ssh public key i can give you write access to the wiki git backend.

>At home I have the following that might be useful:
>-TinyFPGA BX (ice40 fpga), DE0 Nano (cyclone 4 fpga)
>-Soldering station, rework station, cheap usb microscope - I'm not the 
>greatest, but can solder 0402 (especially now that I have tweezers)
>-ESD mat and wrist strap
>-Current computer setup for Debian has 8GB RAM, quad core i5
>sandybridge
>-Cheap 16MHz logic analyser
>-NanoVNA (might come in handy for antennas)

nice.

>Unfortunately I don't have any proper measurement instrumentation or 
>bench equipment such as oscilloscopes or lab supplies (except my trusty
>
>multimeter of course haha!), so for now there's not a lot of 
>characterisation I could do.

multimeter is good.

we'll be getting a batch of raptor ECP5 boards soon, 85k LUT4s, lots of DDR3 RAM.

>My IRC nick is "octavius" (I participated for the first time today,
>will 
>be back tomorrow).

ok :)

>
>If you would like to know more about me, my personal site is 
>https://technepisteme.xyz/

star, drop this on the about_us page.

>Thanks for reading,
>
>Andrey
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Libre-soc-dev mailing list
>Libre-soc-dev at lists.libre-soc.org
>http://lists.libre-soc.org/mailman/listinfo/libre-soc-dev