Hi Henk, On Monday 11 January 2010 17:47:14 you wrote: > I saw your presentation @ CCC in Berlin and I was very impressed! This > is pretty cool stuf, it awakend my interest in FPGA's. > > I would like to play around with an FPGA for fun and education purposes.
Cool :) > Altough I have an electronics engineering background I must admit that > my logic simulation background is pretty rusty. Last time I played with > VHDL was in the 1990's with some baby level practicum excercises .... > > So please forgive my ignorance on the subject. > > > My initial goal would be to have Linux running on an FPGA probably based > on Milkymist at least with the console running on an uart. > > Now I have googled a bit for evaluation boards, and it seams that > there's an evaluation kit for Spartan-6 which has a reasonable price > tag of 295 USD. It is based on a XC6SLX16-CS324 which seems as close > as possible to the Milkymist one evaluation board. > > ( http://www.xilinx.com/products/devkits/EK-S6-SP601-G.htm ) > > > What do you think, would this board enable me to run Milkymist? It's definitely possible (although probably not with every accelerator and peripheral, but those are not required for running Linux), however you will need to adapt the memory controller (and the caches and DMA masters that are directly connected to it) to 16-bit DDR2 instead of 32-bit DDR, which is a nontrivial task and could be very hard to start with especially if you have little FPGA experience. The MCB (hard memory controller of Spartan6) might make things easier, but I do not know if and how it could be efficiently interfaced to Milkymist's FML memory bus. Otherwise, I am currently designing prototypes of a custom board with out-of- the-box support, which might be generally available as development boards at the end of this year. There are few FPGA boards available nowadays that have 32-bit DDR. If you are lucky, you might get your hands on a ML401/402/403 from eBay. There is also the XUPV2P which might be easier to find and has suitable memory. > Is there a way to run an emulator, would it even be feasible > todo a milkymist emulation on a PC platform without some sort of > FPGA hardware? Yes! until recently, there is now experimental QEMU support of the LM32 instruction set (developed by Michael Walle): http://github.com/lekernel/qemu-milkymist Right now, simulation models for the Milkymist UART, timers and video output are missing. If you want to start with developing them (a lot easier than DDR/DDR2 memory systems but still very helpful) you are very welcome. > Thanks again for your extremely inspiring presentation. My pleasure. Best regards, Sébastien _______________________________________________ http://lists.milkymist.org/listinfo.cgi/devel-milkymist.org IRC: #milkym...@freenode Webchat: www.milkymist.org/irc.html Wiki: www.milkymist.org/wiki
