On Thu, 14 Mar 2019 at 15:30, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
I assume that you can put this on a FPGA, as Chris Tyler talked about on Tuesday. I haven't checked this. I think that it is in verilog, but I'm not sure. <https://github.com/westerndigitalcorporation/swerv_eh1>
There's also an emulator: <https://github.com/westerndigitalcorporation/swerv-ISS>
I have no idea if there is MMU support in the core (needed for reasonable Linux).
If you search at AliExpress.com, for "risc-v", a whole lineup of options pop up, all FPGA boards of one sort or another. For instance, one called "Liche Tang", and another that's a Xilinx FPGA (that Chris mentioned at the meeting), specifically, in the Artix-7 series, the XC7A35T and XC7A50T processors, the first with around "35K cells" and the other with around "50K cells". A couple of reviews out there of the "Liche Tang": - https://justanotherelectronicsblog.com/?p=470 - https://www.cnx-software.com/2018/09/04/licheetang-anlogic-eg4s20-fpga-board... I think it's the Liche Tang that Chris was referencing when he mentioned a "$17 board". AliExpress sells it for $31 CAD; I'm not sure where to get it for $17, and that might be $17 USD. The justanotherelectronicsblog.com link has considerable useful detail for the likes of us, pointing to Verilog code repos, development tools, and quite a bit of other relevant stuff should one spend $17/$31 and want to play with it. The one thing it seems to be missing that I wish it had was Ethernet. I imagine that could be a Bit of Verilog Away, though that somehow feels like an oversimplification. (Opencores.org has a whole bunch of Ethernet implementations! Thanks for the pointer, Kevin!) There's a bit of a world of "and now what to do about a distribution?" after that; that would be absolutely on point here. The notion of a little RISC-V chip running a Linux from Scratch using S6 and MUSL seems interesting as a substrate to run more stuff on... -- When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"