[Libre-soc-dev] Introduction

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

---
crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68

On Fri, Sep 10, 2021 at 2:46 PM Andrey Miroshnikov
<andrey at technepisteme.xyz> wrote:

> If there are UE modems widely available on the market with fully open
> firmware let me know.

TL Lim is sponsoring someone to reverse-engineer the qualcomm 3G/LTE modem
used in the pinephone.  they've been spectacularly successful.

> On 09/09/2021 22:47, lkcl wrote:
>  > nice. i'm in tiptree at the moment.
> Ah, so that's where the the tasty ketchup and other fancy sauces come from!
> I'm in downham, in norfolk. Nice little place, on the edge of the fens.

seaside road trip!

> Says here modula-2 is based on pascal:
> https://www.modula2.org/reference/index.php

yes. we were taught it so as to avoid us ending up getting hired
away from completing our degree, as happened so frequently
that Imperial College Dept. of Computing stopped using c as
the teaching language.  so, we learned it on our own time.

>  > 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.
> Sure, although I haven't used the qemu emulator before.
> The work Kyle is doing, is that under bug 686, create Power ISA test API?

yes.  qemu is already "supported"
https://git.libre-soc.org/?p=openpower-isa.git;a=blob;f=src/openpower/simulator/test_sim.py;hb=HEAD

we've used it in the past to cross-run the ISACaller simulator against qemu, to
verify certain instructions.  ironically, we found bugs in qemu.

the other necessary task - and it's quite a big one that, really, everyone
should pitch in with - is to convert all test_isa_caller.py tests over to
"expected" form.  each unit test, instead of explicitly calling
self.assertEqual(),
establishes a "Power ISA test API" instance *containing* the expected
results... then simply calls the function that kyle's working on (check_regs)

> I've attached my SSH pub key (my username doesn't match the IRC nick). I
> guess you want me to pull in the wiki git repo, make the necessary
> changes (with an appropriate commit message) and push back to master?

yep.

>  > star, drop this on the about_us page.
> During one of your emails (probably 2019) I remember you strongly
> suggesting to do several commits as opposed to making too many changes

absolutely.  there's very few exceptions to that one.

> (I still remember because on several occasions made this mistake with my
> own repos). Shall I fix the HDL workflow page, commit, and then add to
> the About Us page in a separate commit?

the rule is:

   if you are tempted to use the word 'and' in the - well-written - commit
   message, it's not a single-purpose commit.  split it.


> I combined the responses from Jacob, Luke, and Veera, however if the
> policy is to make several replies, I'll do that. Didn't want to swamp
> you with emails.

great idea.

> Also, some questions on formatting email. Should I limit my response to
> 80 chars per line?

if replying ends up being converted such that a single paragraph has
one "> " in front of it (forcing the writer to do extra work i.e. split it
manually a few words at a time) rather than the 30-year-established standard
practice of one "> " per line, then yes, definitely.

l.