[Arm-netbook] Any progress?

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2020 at 5:13 PM Richard Wilbur <richard.wilbur at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On Sep 18, 2020, at 07:09, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net> wrote:
> > […]
>
> > i got up and running on an FPGA a couple weeks ago
> > (Versa ECP5)
> > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72QmWro9BSE
>
> Congratulations on the success of booting the libre SoC on FPGA.  Which processor instruction set architecture are you folks using?

OpenPOWER ISA.

> Looks like the toolchain for that FPGA has a free/libré license?[*]

yes.  nextpnr5, developed by daveshah and others.  yosys talks to
that, through something called trellis.

>  Did I misread the Lattice Semiconductor announcement?

no - the *lattice* toolchain is proprietary.

> If it’s really free/libré I might have to save my pennies for one of those boards!

nextpnr5 is a bitch to compile because it uses python-boost by
default.  all you need do there is compile "--disable-boost
--disable-python" or something like that, you'll have to investigate,
and you get a non-GUI toolchain (you don't need or want the GUI
anyway).


i recommend getting both the ulx3s https://www.crowdsupply.com/radiona/ulx3s

*and* also the VERSA-ECP5
https://nl.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Lattice/LFE5UM-45F-VERSA-EVN

the reason is because the VERSA-ECP5 has a 1 gigabit DDR3 IC on it,
plus some other stuff that the ULX3S doesn't have, *but* the ULX3S has
an SDRAM IC which is a lot simpler, is SDR, and so we can sort-of test
against that and then have reasonable confidence that the ASIC will
work.  ULX3S also has an SDcard slot on it.

l.