On Tue, Jul 26, 2016 at 12:05:23PM -0400, Przemek Klosowski wrote: > Why are the proprietary bits in this case problematic, if we have > proprietary bits in the context of module (e.g. wireless) firmware > and CPU microcode patches?
Right, in fact the proprietary bits have a firmware-like license as was pointed out to me in this comment: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2016/07/26/risc-v-on-an-fpga-pt-5/#comments So subject to legal review of that license, maybe we can treat it as firmware. > By the way, while the FPGA bitstream generation in general is still > highly proprietary, there is a break in the wall: Clifford Wolff > developed an open-source FPGA toolchain for Lattice iCE40 FPGAs > http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/ . > Now, iCE40 is a fairly simple FPGA---that's why it was possible to > develop a non-proprietary toolchain for it. I am not sure what > limitations it imposes on the RISC-V flavor that fits on > it----Clifford has compiled PicoRV32 which I think is not suitable > to run Linux, but I am sure the rest is just a SMOP :) > https://github.com/cliffordwolf/icotools/tree/master/icosoc Yes, hopefully this will develop into something we can use one day. Right now the Artix-7 model that I'm using has > 100K cells, whereas even the top of the line iCE40 has 7680. (But hey, the first ever FPGA I used had 32, so we've come a long way.) Plus there are other things in the Artix-7 that we use like the DDR3 RAM interface and the UART, and in future one hopes the ethernet & VGA. By this time next year it may be that lowRISC will have produced actual silicon -- a 4-core Rocket + 8 "minion" mini cores (https://speakerdeck.com/asb/lowrisc-plans-for-risc-v-in-2016) Architecturally this is going to be a strange bit of kit, because in order to do any I/O (even a serial port) you will have to use the minion cores, each running a mini OS. Linux cannot run on those cores. The lowRISC plan is to run a NetBSD-based unikernel. I don't know how (or if) we'd deal with that in Fedora. Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com virt-df lists disk usage of guests without needing to install any software inside the virtual machine. Supports Linux and Windows. http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-df/ -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
