[Libre-soc-dev] ls180 update

[Jean-Philippe Turcotte]

Hello everyone,

I have been lurking on the lists since more than a year, and have finally decided to subscribe here. I am sadly not a programmer. Except for a year of computer science more than a decade ago, my background is in management and education. However, I am a tech enthusiast, and I find your project exciting, inspiring, and sorely needed. I hope you succeed.

By the way, I accept to abide with the Charter for all my interactions with the team. Also, I am a total noob with mailing lists, so I apologize if I screw up.


> as an experiment i extracted the vhdl using yosys, into a verilog file for
> compilation with verilator, which is over 1,000,000 lines long.
>
> from that 1,000,000 line file verilator has produced 3,000 sub-files.
> compiling even the ones with a #include and nothing else takes 10 minutes
> each.  estimates for completion of compilation is therefore several weeks.
>
> this is not reasonable unless we have access to a beowulf cluster with
> distcc.
>
> l.

This piqued my interest. Could this be run in the cloud?

I took a glance at Verilator’s docs, but I cannot tell if we can just throw more threads at it, and expect it to go faster. Also, would that affect the simulation?

Am I correct in my assumption that this is a two-stage process generating C++, and that this generated code can then be compiled as usual with any C++ compiler? Again, I am not a coder, but I can run commands. If it is as simple as using many threads to get the C++ in a reasonable amount of time, and then use a distributed compiler, I can give it a shot.

What do you say?

Sincerely,
J.P.