The OpTiMSoC Blog

In our blog we regularly post about the status of the project, things we figured out while working on it and other things that might come to our mind. Please contact us if you want to share your experience with OpTiMSoC, guest posts are always welcome!

OpTiMSoC Enabled Demonstrator System with Fault-Tolerant NoC

by Max Koenen, posted on 26 January 2021

Although it has been silent around OpTiMSoC in recent months, some development is still ongoing. Based on OpTiMSoC, a demonstrator system has been developed in the scope of the ARAMiS II research project and has since been further improved. This blog post describes the demonstrator system, its architecture and building blocks, and the alterations and extensions made to OpTiMSoC in order to build it.

OpTiMSoC wins the Eurolab4HPC Open Source Project Award!

by Philipp Wagner, posted on 16 June 2019

How exciting! At the Week of Open Source Hardware (WOSH) in Zürich, OpTiMSoC co-won the Eurolab4HPC Open Source Project Award! We’re very excited and honored to see the efforts we put into OpTiMSoC being more widely recognized. Thanks a lot to the sponsors of this award!

The other prices went to Nyuzi, a processor for highly parallel and GPGPU applications, and FuseSoC, a hardware package manager and build tool which we use in OpTiMSoC!

You can find OpTiMSoC, Nyuzi, FuseSoC, and many other great projects, listed at the Open Source contributions page.

Stefan and Philipp accept the award at WOSH

2018.1 Release: Linux, Debugging, Automation, and Tons of Fixes

by Philipp Wagner, posted on 20 December 2018

Woohoo! After more than two years of work and 479 git commits later we are very proud to present the all-new 2018.1 release of OpTiMSoC! A look at the statistics gives a first impression of how large this release is: diffstat tells us about 973 files changed, 133,697 lines inserted and 58,806 lines deleted. Or in other words, the code size increased by 74,891 lines! How do those lines of code translate into functionality, you may ask? Let’s have a closer look.

Debug Infrastructure

The debug infrastructure of OpTiMSoC is essential in getting code running on the system, in debugging it, and in performing measurements. Over the last year we have fully re-implemented the host software of the debug system as part of Open SoC Debug (OSD), and imported it back into OpTiMSoC. Together with this rewrite we extended and improved the OSD specification document to be even more complete, flexible, and robust.

Other changes:

Refreshed Network on Chip (NoC) Implementation

In previous generations of OpTiMSoC we relied on a NoC implementation called LISNoC. Developed as part of a research project a couple years ago it has shown its age in various places. Stefan took up the job of reimplementing significant parts of it, leading to a design which is easier to understand and more flexible as a result.

Testing and Automation

OpTiMSoC is complex: hardware, software, tooling, all need to work together to form a feature-rich System on Chip. To ensure that we don’t accidentally break functionality we have added more tests on various levels. The tests can be executed manually by every developer, and are executed automatically: some on every check-in, some once a day.

User Experience

OpTiMSoC is used at TUM for research and teaching purposes. With many different people working on it it is essential to provide a great out-of-the-box user experience. Many small changes in this regard accumulated over the period of this release.

Linux Support

Most users of OpTiMSoC run baremetal software on it, i.e. programming it like a microcontroller without any operating system. Supporting advanced operating systems has always been a dream, but getting there required a lot of work. But with all the small and large changes in this release and in the previous releases, we finally were able to make our dream come true: reliably boot Linux on OpTiMSoC. Partly responsible for this dream is also the work of Stafford Horne, who worked relentlessly to update the OpenRISC port of Linux upstream and to incorporate all the changes that accumulated over the years.

Read more about that in Linux on OpTiMSoC: How many small steps unlock a whole new world.

Contributors

This release would not have happened without the continued great work of our contributors. In this release the following people contributed.

Linux on OpTiMSoC: How many small steps unlock a whole new world

by Philipp Wagner, posted on 19 December 2018

Some projects we take upon ourselves are done quickly: start, do the work, profit. Others take a bit longer. And then there are these projects which seem to linger forever in an “almost done” state. Just one more small thing and we’ll be done. A small fix here. An extension to a module there. A new component elsewhere. And so it goes on, and on, and on. For days, for weeks, for years. Adding Linux support to OpTiMSoC is such a story. But there’s a happy end: Linux support has finally arrived!

This blog post tells the story of how Linux can be now used on OpTiMSoC, and shines a bit of light on the obstacles along the way.

How it all looks in the end

A picture is always a good starting point, so let’s start with a picture.

An overview of how Linux runs on OpTiMSoC

The picture shows a simplified version of the whole system we’ve set up to run Linux on OpTiMSoC. On the left is the “Host PC” where the developer sits. On the bottom at right is the FPGA board, in this case a Nexys 4 DDR board (recently renamed to Nexys A7-100T) containing a Xilinx Artix 7 FPGA (the XC7A100T to be exact). The board is connected to the Host PC through USB, and the FPGA is programmed with a bitstream containing our SoC design.

The design (all described in Verilog) is shown on the top right. At its center is the Wishbone bus which connects a single OpenRISC CPU core, DDR memory, and a 16550 UART module (we’ll get to that in a minute). Supporting this infrastructure is the debug system. It connects to the memory and the UART and enables them to speak with the Host PC.

What we want to achieve (and what not)

Before we go into all the gory details, let’s first discuss the goals of this whole exercise.

To avoid confusion, let’s also discuss the things we don’t want to achieve.

With the goals and non-goals clearly stated let’s have a look at how all this machinery can be brought to life.

Let’s cook up a Linux system on OpTiMSoC!

Before we can get started we first need to prepare our “ingredients”. Don’t worry for now if you don’t know where to get these “ingredients” from, we’ll discuss that later.

  1. A bitstream for the FPGA containing the SoC design as shown in the picture.
  2. Software on the Host PC (which also runs Linux) to interact with the FPGA.
  3. Finally, we need a Linux root image. That’s the software which we will execute on the OpenRISC CPU.

With everything prepared let’s start our recipe, the steps we need to take to boot up Linux on OpTiMSoC are simple.

  1. Program the FPGA with the bitstream.
  2. Connect to the system through the debug infrastructure.
  3. The host software detects the UART emulation module on the FPGA and provides a virtual serial port (e.g. /dev/pts/1).
  4. On the Host PC, open a terminal application and connect to the virtual serial port.
  5. Write the Linux root image to the DDR memory using the host software.

That’s it! Once the Linux root image has been written to the DDR memory the CPU starts executing it. In our case, that means Linux boots, and as soon as that’s done, greets you with a login screen: “Welcome to OpTiMSoC”! You can now log into the system as root user, and interact with it as you would do with any other Linux system.

Don’t believe me? Have a look at the video then.

Where do all the components come from?

Everything you’ve seen in the video is using published components of OpTiMSoC. Head to the download page to get the latest release. This gives you pre-built versions of all tools and bitstreams used in this demo. The only thing you need to build yourself it the Linux image.

The Linux root image we’re using is similar to a self-extracting ZIP file: it contains the Linux kernel together with an initial ramdisk (initramfs). That’s essentially a “hard drive image” loaded into memory, with all tools contained in it: a shell, tools like ps or ls, and additional software we chose to add.

To prepare such a image we are using buildroot, a project dedicated to exactly that purpose. Buildroot takes a configuration file as input, and produces a vmlinux file as output. That’s just normal ELF file which we program into the memory on the FPGA board.

All our custom configuration is contained in the optimsoc/optimsoc-buildroot repository. The user guide contains detailed instructions how to make it all work.

Why did it take so long?

The system shown above looks sufficiently simple, doesn’t it? That’s what we thought as well, and again and again. It turns out, to have something as complex as Linux running on a custom system actually requires getting a lot of small and by itself insignificant details right.

Not mentioned here is all the time spent on debugging small issues, fixing the build automation, and adding tests to ensure we don’t break our newly gained Linux functionality any more. Today we have a full Linux build happening every night, performing the exact same steps as you’ve seen in the video, and checking its outputs.

Get started

Do you want to build your own Linux image for OpTiMSoC? Do you want to try out what you’ve seen in the video? Then head over to the tutorial in the user guide!

With Linux running on OpTiMSoC we’ve unlocked a whole new world of possibilities – software can run with minimal porting effort, existing drivers can be reused, and much more. The future is bright, and we’re excited to explore more ways of using OpTiMSoC!

Code with Confidence: OpTiMSoC Always Works!

by Philipp Wagner, posted on 18 December 2018

OpTiMSoC is a highly complex system. If all goes to plan, software, hardware and tooling work together to form a well-integrated SoC (framework). But as so often, the reality is less gloomy: changing a single line of code anywhere could lead to trouble anywhere else. Finding out about breakages only weeks of months after the fact makes debugging a nightmare. [1]

Not any more. After multiple years of despair and a lot of work we can finally say with confidence: “OpTiMSoC always works!” In this blog post we’ll have a look at how we achieved this goal.

The first ingredient to our solution are (automated) tests. OpTiMSoC comes with many tests on various levels up to the full system level; just type make test in your OpTiMSoC source tree to execute them. But: the best tests are useless if they’re not run. And that’s the problem: Compiling all parts of OpTiMSoC and running the tests takes multiple hours. Expecting developers to run all of them after every single change is unrealistic. So we need a better solution, and the answer is (as so often) automation. In this case, the automation is called Continuous Integration, or CI for short.

CI is is not a new concept, of course. It has been used in software development for almost two decades now. Unfortunately, testing and CI in the hardware world are a bit more complicated than in the software world.

The first challenge are tools: While many of the tools we’re using are available as open source, not all of them are. Particularly the tools to generate FPGA bitstreams (e.g. Xilinx Vivado) are closed source, and some of them require a license to operate. Another challenge is the hardware itself: running tests on an FPGA board requires (unsurprisingly) an FPGA board, and a way to connect it to the test machine. A third challenge is time: synthesizing an FPGA bitstream takes multiple hours. Hence waiting for the full build and test to complete significantly reduces developer productivity.

Despite these challenges, we found a way to have extensive test coverage and fast developer feedback. A two-staged solution gets us there. The first stage are tests in Travis CI. Travis is a commonly used continuous integration service which is free to use for open source projects. It integrates nicely into GitHub and can be configured to run a build and test script on every check-in, and on every pull request.

We configured Travis to build OpTiMSoC and to run all simulation-based tests using Verilator. If a Travis run indicates a successful build and test, we already know that all steps outlined in the user guide tutorial up to (and including) the Verilator-based examples work as expected.

The second stage goes beyond what Travis can provide, as we now need access to commercial tools, associated licenses, and real hardware (e.g. FPGA boards). Internally at TUM we have access to a hosted instance of GitLab, which comes with (among many other great things) an integrated continuous integration system, GitLab CI. GitLab CI lets you attach “runners” to it. A runner is nothing else than a PC with a piece of software installed, connecting it to the central GitLab server. We have made a couple machines in our lab a “GitLab runner”. All of them have access to our tools installed on a central NFS share, and some of them have FPGA boards connected to them.

Making use of this setup and combining it with over 200 lines of configuration file we have created a fully automated continuous integration system. Every night, a new build pipeline wakes up (so we don’t need to) and crunches data for more than four hours on up to four machines in parallel.

That’s how it looks in GitLab CI: A look at our build and test pipeline in GitLab CI

Looking closer, the build pipeline consists of the following steps.

With all this automation in place you can now write a short script to always get the latest nightly build of OpTiMSoC, including FPGA bitstreams.

# figure out the latest version of OpTiMSoC [2]
LV=$(curl -sL https://api.bintray.com/packages/optimsoc/nightly/optimsoc-src/versions/_latest  |  python -c 'import sys, json; print json.load(sys.stdin)["name"]')

# get the source archive
curl -sLO https://dl.bintray.com/optimsoc/nightly/optimsoc-$LV-src.tar.gz

# get the OpTiMSoC framework
curl -sLO https://dl.bintray.com/optimsoc/nightly/optimsoc-$LV-base.tar.gz

# and finally: get all examples with all bitstreams
curl -sLO https://dl.bintray.com/optimsoc/nightly/optimsoc-$LV-examples.tar.gz
curl -sLO https://dl.bintray.com/optimsoc/nightly/optimsoc-$LV-examples-ext.tar.gz

You can find all CI configuration used for Travis in our main repository (look for the .travis.yml and Dockerfile files). The results of the Travis runs are also visible online.

The configuration for the GitLab CI is contained in the optimsoc-autobuild repository (look for the .gitlab-ci.yml file). However, this configuration is heavily tailored towards our internal infrastructure and won’t run anywhere else as-is.

So for now, go and give it a try! Use OpTiMSoC to learn and teach, to explore and discover. Have fun!


[1] At least for light debugging. Heavy debugging, typically performed at night, avoids the problem of nightmares in an interesting way: no sleep, no nightmares.

[2] Getting the latest version first is a bit annoying, having a “latest” symlink would be easier of course. This seems to be a restriction Bintray has for their non-paying customers. Having an additional line in a script is a fair price to pay a free service.

What's going on at OpTiMSoC?

by Philipp Wagner, posted on 20 September 2017

Each year in September or early October the OpTiMSoC team attends ORConf, and this year was no exception. In addition to exchanging a lot of ideas with friends and other open source enthusiasts, ORConf presents itself as a good opportunity to reflect on what has happened in OpTiMSoC land over the last year.

As it turns out, there’s a lot we forgot to talk about before!

The future is always hard to predict (and history has told us many times that we’re particularly bad at predictions), but some serious things are cooking and might come to you soon.

As always, if you have questions, let us know! In addition to the mailing list you can find us on Gitter in the optimsoc/Lobby channel.

GSoC 2017 Project: Integration of the OpenRISC Linux Port into OpTiMSoC

by Pedro H. Penna, posted on 04 September 2017

Linux was ported to OpTiMSoC during the 2017’s Google Sumer of Code. This blog post details the work that was accomplished during the project; and as well the work that was left to be tackled.

To port Linux to OpTiMSoC, a new manycore configuration with a Host Tile was designed and implemented. The Host Tile runs OpenRISC Linux and communicates with applications running on Computing Tiles via message-passing through the Network-on-Chip (NoC). Overall, the communication infrastructure is exported to user-level through standard UNIX file system operations, thereby enabling user-level applications running on the Host Tile to rely on a high-level communication abstractions.

I. Design

Figure 1 presents and the design overview of this project. A manycore configuration featuring six tiles is depicted, one host tile and five compute tiles. The host tile has a UART device attached to it and runs the OpenRISC port of Linux; whereas compute tiles runs user-level applications bare metal. Processes running on the Host Tile and user-level applications running on the Compute Tile communicate with one another via message-passing.

Figure 1: Overview of the target manycore configuration.

The OpenRisc Linux kernel running on the Host Tile features a Network-on-Chip (NoC) driver on which processes rely to send/receive messages. Operations on this driver are exported to userland through the standard UNIX system calls for manipulating files. Code Snippet 1 illustrates how a process running on the Host Tile send messages based on this abstraction. As a side remark, note that the user-level application should explicitly build the message header. In future implementation, the idea is to have a user-level library that does this job for the application. On the other hand, in Compute Tiles, user-level applications rely on a baremetal message-passing library to carry out a communication with other tiles.

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    int fd;
    const char *devname = "/dev/noc";

    /* Open NoC device. */
    fd = open(devname, O_WRONLY);
    
    /* Write some data. */
    while (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
        unsigned dest = 0x8000000;
        unsigned data = 0x0000dead;
        unsigned msg = dest | data;
        write(fd, &msg, sizeof(unsigned));
    }
   
    /* Close NoC device. */
    close(fd);

    return (EXIT_SUCCESS);
}

II. NoC Driver Implementation

To enable inter-tile communication, a NoC device driver for Linux was written. This device driver was implemented as a dynamically loadable module and it exports operations on the NoC to userland through regular file system calls. The main internal routines of the implemented driver are discussed next.

/*
 * Opens a NoC endpoint. The device minor number is used to
 * identify the target endpoint to open. Access to an endpoint
 * is exclusive, ie. only one process may use a given endpoint
 * at a time.
 */
int optimsoc_open(struct inode *, struct file *);

/*
 * Releases a NoC endpoint. The device minor number is is used
 * to identify the target  endpoint to release. Underlying
 * resources associated with the endpoint are released.
 */
int optimsoc_release(struct inode, struct file *);

/*
 * Sends messages over an endpoint. The device minor number
 * is used to identify the target endpoint to use on the
 * communication. Sending messages does not block the
 * calling process. The size of messages should be aligned
 * on word size (32 bits). Message headers should be built
 * on user-space.
 */
ssize_t optimsoc_write(struct file *, const char *, size_t, off_t);

/*
 * Receives messages over an endpoint. The device minor
 * number is used to identify the target endpoint to use on
 * the communication. Sending messages blocks the calling
 * process. Flits of a message are buffered in kernel land.
 */
ssize_t optimsoc_read(struct file *, const char *, size_t, off_t);

III. Building the Project

Since the Linux source tree is not yet integrated into OpTiMSoC Project, you should follow the next steps to get it running on OpTiMSoC.

Part 1: Setup OpTiMSoC

Follow the upstream online instructions at: https://www.optimsoc.org/docs/master/user_guide/installation.html

In the end, set the OPTIMSOC environment variable to point to the installation location of OpTiMSoC.

Part 2: Get Development Tools

To build Linux, you will need a slightly diferent toolchain than the one used to build OpTiMSoC.

mkdir -p $HOME/toolchain

cd $HOME/toolchain

wget  https://github.com/openrisc/or1k-gcc/releases/download/or1k-5.4.0-20170218/or1k-elf-5.4.0-20170218.tar.bz2

tar -xjvf or1k-elf-5.4.0-20170218.tar.bz2

wget https://github.com/openrisc/or1k-gcc/releases/download/or1k-5.4.0-20170218/or1k-linux-musl-5.4.0-20170218.tar.bz2

tar -xjvf or1k-linux-musl-5.4.0-20170218.tar.bz2

wget https://github.com/openrisc/or1k-gcc/releases/download/or1k-5.4.0-20170218/or1k-linux-5.4.0-20170218.tar.bz2

tar -xjvf or1k-linux-5.4.0-20170218.tar.bz2

Part 3: Build Unit Tests (Optional)

You can test your Linux build in OpTiMSoC with a simple distributed application:

export LIBS=$OPTIMSOC/soc/sw/lib/baremetal/libbaremetal.a

git clone https://github.com/optimsoc/linux-apps $HOME/linux-apps

cd $HOME/linux-apps/

export CC=$HOME/toolchain/or1k-linux-musl/bin/or1k-linux-musl-gcc


$CC hello-linux/hello.c -o hello-linux/hello

export CC=$HOME/toolchain/or1k-elf/bin/or1k-elf-gcc
export CFLAGS=”-I $OPTIMSOC/soc/sw/include/baremetal/”

$CC $CFLAGS hello-baremetal/hello.c -o hello-baremetal/hello $LIBS    

Part 4: Build Linux

Setup toolchain.

export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/toolchain/or1k-linux/bin/
export ARCH=openrisc
export CROSS_COMPILE=or1k-linux-

(Optional) If you have built unit tests from Step 3, you should copy hello-linux to the the initramfs directory.

mkdir -p $HOME/linux/arch/openrisc/initramfs/
    cp $HOME/linux-apps/hello-linux/hello $HOME/linux/arch/openrisc/initramfs/

Clone and build Linux. Note that this is done in three steps: (i) build system configuration; (ii) build dynamic modules; and (iii) build the kernel.

git clone https://github.com/optimsoc/linux.git $HOME/linux

cd $HOME/linux

make optimsoc_defconfig
make modules
make

III. Conclusions

During this GSoC project I wrote a Linux NoC driver for OpTiMSoC-based platforms. This driver was implemented as a dynamically loadable module and used standard file system kernel calls to export the message passing of the underlying platform to user space. Concerning the current implementation, the following work remains open:

2016.1 Release: Heart Surgery for FuseSoC and Open SoC Debug

by Philipp Wagner, posted on 02 September 2016

It’s OpTiMSoC release time! After a bit over half a year of work, we’re proud to announce our first release in this year, 2016.1. It comes with many great new features, but two are especially noteworthy: our switch to FuseSoC and the integration of Open SoC Debug. Both new features strengthen our collaborations with other projects – because sharing is caring!

Part 1: FuseSoC

Traditionally, every digital hardware project had its own build system and its own way of managing dependencies, and OpTiMSoC was no exception. Especially for people coming from the software world with all the nice package managers and module repositories specialized to the various programming languages, this seems a bit arcane. Fortunately, our friend Olof Kindgren has put a lot of work into FuseSoC, a tool that fills exactly that gap: a package manager, dependency solver and build system for digital hardware designs.

For this release, we took the chance to perform a bit of heart surgery: rip out our existing build infrastructure based on TCL files, and replace it with FuseSoC’s core description files.

While we restored all the existing functionality, i.e. to run Verilator, Vivado Synthesis and the various simulation tools through FuseSoC, we discovered a couple of issues with FuseSoC that are not all fixed upstream yet. While we work on getting all our changes upstream, we ship OpTiMSoC with a slightly modified FuseSoC version, which is available by calling optimsoc-fusesoc. One main reason is that we are using the new <vendor>:<library>:<name>:<version> (vlnv) naming scheme that we prototyped before it is now also getting into upstream. Beside that, we added Vivado and better xsim support, that we will also get into the official fusesoc version soon.

So what does that mean for you? Synthesizing a 2x2 tiled multi-core system with four compute tiles using Xilinx Vivado is now as simple as

optimsoc-fusesoc --cores-root $OPTIMSOC_SOURCE/examples build optimsoc:examples:system_2x2_cccc_nexys4ddr

Building and running a Verilator-based simulation of a single compute tile with two mor1kx cores is not much harder:

optimsoc-fusesoc --cores-root $OPTIMSOC_SOURCE/examples sim optimsoc:examples:compute_tile_sim --NUM_CORES 2

See the documentation for more examples.

Part 1b: Sharing Hardware Modules

By switching to FuseSoC, we are now able to much easier share hardware modules with other projects. In the old days, sharing meant copying HDL files around, and missing updates whenever there were new releases. With FuseSoC, it’s easy to simply point to a Git repository containing HDL files, or even download a ZIP file with HDL files from a web site (a great usage example of FuseSoC!).

We use this feature to factor out and share some of our modules.

Right now, we ship all these sources inside our source tree to make changes and editing easier. If the rate of changes decreases over time, we can move to directly including these dependencies from upstream.

Part 2: Open SoC Debug (OSD)

OpTiMSoC has always included a rather sophisticated trace-based debug infrastructure. As it turns out, we’re not the only open source digital hardware project that needs such a infrastructure. In order to share effort, we founded, together with the LowRISC project and in close cooperation with the PULPino project, Open SoC Debug (OSD).

The goal of this project is to collaborate on debug and diagnosis components, as they are included in OpTiMSoC: components for instruction traces, system traces, memory initialization, and much more.

In this OpTiMSoC release, we see the first results of this collaboration. Our debug infrastructure is now based on OSD. All debug features that were available previously are still there, and some features are new:

The main visible difference today are new tools to communicate with the OpTiMSoC system. Instead of our own tools like optimsoc-cli, we now use the OSD tools, like osd-cli. You find much more about how to use them in the updated tutorials in the User Guide.

Part 3: FPGA Synthesis

Support for FPGA synthesis and prebuilt example FPGA bitstreams are available again. We currently focus on the Nexys 4 DDR and the KC705 boards. But as we have defined a good board abstraction layer now, it is a lot easier to support other boards. Please get in touch with us if you want to have another board mainline supported.

Part 4: The small things

There were much more small changes throughout the system. Some things without special order.

The future is bright

With this release we’ve layed a lot of groundwork for even faster progress in the future. Some things are already in the pipeline, including a cool demo with live video streams.

We currently plan a project sprint and plan the next release for end of October with the following improvements:

Stay tuned and join us on IRC or the mailing list.

Contributors to this release

Without the work of many individuals, a project like OpTiMSoC would be impossible. We thank everybody who contributed to this release and the projects that we included into our release.

(This list is likely to be incomplete; if you’re missing, let us know!)

2015.1 Release and Back to Unified Tree

by Stefan Wallentowitz, posted on 30 December 2015

Good news first: We have a put out a regular release and we promise to do this more often. Until now there was not much sense to make releases, because everything was in a flow and there was not even an installation package. But this has changed, from now on regular releases can be found on github. The release numbers are numbered throughout the year (2015.1 on December 30 will hopefully not happen again..).

We have also accordingly updated the download instruction, pretty simple now, right?

Now to the kind of “bad” news: We are moving back from Google repo to a unified source tree, plus extra repositories for demo apps, FPGA target code, etc. It simply turned out that for people new to git, the usage of repo is too challenging and time-consuming. Hence, you can now find the unified source tree github. We have brought in all changes from the distributed repos again.

But to turn it into good news again, you can install from sources with one simple installer script (a better one to come in 2016):

git clone https://github.com/optimsoc/sources optimsoc-sources
./optimsoc-sources/tools/install.py -d /opt/optimsoc/current

We are looking forward to a more active 2016 and wish you all a Happy New Year!

Switch to github organization and Google repo

by Stefan Wallentowitz, posted on 16 May 2015

A few weeks ago we started cutting out the different parts of OpTiMSoC from the original repository to separate repositories at the new organization. The aim is to structure it better and have separation of different aspects of OpTiMSoC.

The method of separating subtrees from the original tree with keeping the history is straight forward using git filter-branch. Some parts of the history get lost, especially for the system software. Nevertheless, we now have cut the original large repository into smaller logical units. Some of them are only needed for installation if you simply want to run OpTiMSoC, others are needed to build systems or for debugging.

Finally, we struggled a bit with still allowing for a unified tree layout, which is desirable for the documentation and ease of use. We wanted a tree similar to the original layout and inspected git submodule and git subtree. Unfortunately both did not convince us entirely, as we don’t want people to learn new merge strategies etc.

We first started with a simple shell script that initially creates the layout. After some more search we came to Google repo, which is a git wrapper for Android developers. While we don’t plan to use the entire feature set, we use it to distribute the tree layout. The layout is distributed as xml files and it is possible to define groups for different feature sets.

To start a layout, simply create an empty folder, download the repo script and make it executable:

mkdir optimsoc
wget https://storage.googleapis.com/git-repo-downloads/repo
chmod a+x repo

Now you can initialize the repository layout. The script downloads some more files from Google’s repositories and reads the remote xml description into a local repository of the repository files, both in the hidden path .repo.

./repo init -u https://github.com/optimsoc/optimsoc-repo

You then synchronize the repositories and repo clones and puts them into “detached HEAD” state.

 ./repo sync

If you want to create a new feature branch for a part of OpTiMSoC you can use the repo infrastructure or simply do this with the usual git commands (create branch, stage, commit etc.). We are also still experimenting with the best development strategies.

Website updates and mailing list

by Stefan Wallentowitz, posted on 12 May 2015

Maybe not visible to the outside, but there has been a change in the website rcently. We have updated the documentation, moved the entire site to github pages and added some social media buttons to share the website or our blog posts.

Also very important to mention we want to (re-)activate the mailing list (optimsoc.lists.lrz.de). So if you have any feedback, questions or ideas please feel free to send a mail there. You can also subsribe to the list and always stay updated:

As you might have noticed, we are also preparing a release, this time seriously ;)

Many New Ideas from ORCONF

by Philipp Wagner, posted on 12 October 2014

Every autumn the community around the OpenRISC processor meets somewhere to discuss the current status of the project, to exchange ideas with other free/open hardware projects, and to discuss future directions. This year the OpenRISC Conference “ORCONF” was held at TUM in Munich and attracted around 40 people from all over Europe and the US.

The OpenRISC processor implementation “mor1kx” powers the the OpTiMSoC compute tiles, and we have been active in its development for some time now. So it was an easy call to make when the question of where to host the next conference came up: visit us in Munich!

What followed was a great weekend with many interesting talks. Olof started off with a status update on OpenRISC in general, followed by talks presenting the changes to the individual components of the OpenRISC project, such as toolchain and various porting efforts, e.g. of the Linux Kernel. How OpenRISC is used in the wild was shown by reports from research groups all over Europe, which are using the OpenRISC architecture as base of their SoC designs.

Implementing OpenRISC in JavaScript? Why not, thought Sebastian Macke a couple years ago, and out of this idea the jor1k emulator was born. In addition to some demos he showed us what’s necessary to implement a fast (80 MIPS on an iPad!) emulator in JavaScript.

The round of talks was completed by presentations of exciting upcoming topics such as the RISC-V ISA with its implementation, Rocket, the lowRISC project with the goal of building silicon in an open way, and various other topics related to free/open hardware design.

Thanks to everybody who joined us for the conference, and thanks for making OpenRISC a success!

Additional resources:

Switching Host-Communication to GLIP

by Philipp Wagner, posted on 30 July 2014

Since its beginning, OpTiMSoC contained a method for communication between a PC and an FPGA board. For the ZTEX 1.15 boards we used the USB 2.0 interface, based on the Cypress FX2 chip available on those boards. As we continued the development, we realized that this connectivity functionality is not only useful in OpTiMSoC, but in other projects as well.

We now finally got around to factor the communication interface out of OpTiMSoC and to moved it into a new project, which we named the “Generic Logic Interface Project”, or in short, GLIP. It provides generic, FIFO-based communication between a host and a target, abstracting away all the nitty gritty details and protocols in between. It lets you simply focus on the data you want to transfer, handling everything else for you.

As of now GLIP contains a cleaned-up and improved version of the Cypress FX2-based USB 2.0 backend, reaching up to 21 MByte/s bi-directional transfer rate (close to the achievable maximum of the USB 2.0 interface), and a host-only TCP backend for communication between a simulated system (e.g. in ModelSim) and a controller.

In the near future, other backends for JTAG and possibly PCIe are planned.

We provide GLIP with an extensive set of documentation under the MIT license, check it out!

With the newest latest trunk version of OpTiMSoC liboptimsochost uses GLIP for all Debug NoC based communications, so you need to have GLIP installed if you want to use those as of now.

Enjoy!

OpTiMSoC at FOSDEM

by Philipp Wagner, posted on 03 January 2014

It’s official! We are proud to announce that our talk at FOSDEM has been accepted. FOSDEM, for those of you who have never heard of it, is one of the largest Free/Open Source conferences in Europe with a very strong focus on developers and technology. It is held every year in Brusseles, Belgium. This year it takes place on February 1st and 2nd.

Since we don’t expect the whole audience to be very deep into hardware design we will first give a short introduction of how SoC design is done these days, and then showcase some cool things you can do with OpTiMSoC. More information about the talk is available at the conference homepage.

I will be attending the whole conference, let me know if you’re around. I’d love to hear from you if you have problems with OpTiMSoC or ideas on how to make it better. See you at FOSDEM!

Update: The nice people at FOSDEM also published a short interview with me about the talk. Find it on the FOSDEM page!

Update 2: Now the recorded video is online as well. Download the video or watch it below! The slides are available online as well.

OpTiMSoC at ORCONF 2013

by Philipp Wagner, posted on 30 October 2013

The “brain” in a SoC is its processor; in OpTiMSoC this task falls to a the freely available OpenRISC processor. For the second year now the developers of the OpenRISC processor met in Cambridge, UK for a two-day conference on October 5th and 6th to discuss the current status of the project as well as plans for the future.

Stefan attended this conference and came home with a lot of new ideas and information, which we’ll incorporate into OpTiMSoC in the future. But he was also able to give a 45 minute presentation about OpTiMSoC, what it is, and how you can make use of it. The whole talk was recorded, you can watch it down below or on YouTube. Enjoy!

OpTiMSoC has a new web site!

by Philipp Wagner, posted on 27 August 2013

OpTiMSoC is growing rapidly. Most of the time we have our heads deep down into the internals, chasing large and small bugs, implementing exciting new features and if it all works, enjoy a beer at night.

Then last weekend I thought about how we present all our work to the public – and as you might have guessed, there’s some room for improvement. As a first step we decided to redesign our homepage, giving it more content to help you understand what OpTiMSoC is, where you can get all the necessary parts to get started and how you can become part of the OpTiMSoC world.

We hope you like it and please get back to us with any feedback you might have.