[libre-riscv-dev] Introduction

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Sat, Feb 2, 2019 at 4:49 PM Aleksandar Kostovic
<alexandar.kostovic at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > when you're comfortable and have that feeling best described as "a V8
> > supercharged engine revving at 8000 RPM but the clutch pedal is still
> > on the floor", do let me know, as there are some preliminary tests,
> > simulations or self-contained projects that could be done (one being a
> > modular pipelined IEEE754 ALU)
>
>
> I think i could be ready to start this. Where do we begin?

 ok so i should set up a repo, something boring like ieee754alu, which
can be used as a submodule.  mainly, we need to set and agree some
development rules / processes.

 oh, can i suggest looking at the berkeley softfloat library, it seems
to be a very clear implementation.  a copy is in the riscv-isa-tests,
see e.g. softfloat/s_addMagsF32.c

 we need to start with something really simple, make sure that there
are proper unit tests in place, then move forward incrementally.

 although it may sound strange, i'd like to actually *use* the
softfloat library to do unit tests (as it's been in such prevalent
use).  create a command-line calculator (c-based) that can be talked
to via a pipe from python, in order to feed it numbers to calculate,
that are then compared against the nmigen simulation.

l.