On Thursday 08 April 2010 23:47:17 Philip Pemberton wrote: > The problem is inferring memories with a set content on startup, i.e. > ROMs. I'm not aware of a way to do that with Verilog short of a massive > 'case' statement.
Many synthesizers (at least Xst, Synplify and Precision) support $readmemh/$readmemb in an initial block, which is very convenient and portable. > The nice thing about M4K ROMs is that I can use SRecord to convert the > binary file into a .MIF (Memory Initialization File) which Quartus will > then read in at compile-time and load into the M4K. This could be a winner for a "let's make it as less portable as possible" contest :p > > From my experience with Mico32, the concerns about quality that I have > > are related to the GNU toolchain, the GNU/Linux port > > Yeah, I've heard the bad things that were said about the Linux port... > though from what I've heard the toolchain (or at least gcc 3.4 + patch > and binutils 2.20.1) is quite stable. When you compile small programs, it's OK. When compiling more beefy stuff line Linux kernels or applications, I routinely get internal compiler errors, endless loops, generation of corrupt code, etc. Let alone the broken FDPIC support in the toolchain. Those issues are mindsucking to fix and we can probably thank the retarded and hypocritical FSF obfuscation policy [1] for that. I would prefer going with a LLVM LM32 backend plus our own assembler/linker and solve the problem once and for all. > > I think the hardware design is really good (that cache issue doesn't > > count, the problem stems from Xst). > > Which versions of ISE/Xst is that bug known to manifest on? All versions that I tested (10.1, 11.1, 11.2, 11.4) when synthesizing for Virtex 4. Let's hope that it works for Spartan-6 (that the final M1 board is using). I have reported this issue (and others) to Xilinx, they said they would fix it but they never did. Maybe it's fixed in 11.5 but I have little hope. Sébastien [1] http://www.advogato.org/article/701.html _______________________________________________ http://lists.milkymist.org/listinfo.cgi/devel-milkymist.org IRC: #milkym...@freenode Webchat: www.milkymist.org/irc.html Wiki: www.milkymist.org/wiki
