[libre-riscv-dev] Introduction

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 9:13 PM Anais Poirier <anais.shiraz at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello All,
>
> My name is Anais, I'm a third year electrical and computer engineering
> student at the University of Toronto, and I am Cole Poirier's sister!

hi, lovely to hear from you.  Cole mentioned you a couple days ago
when i had a monster 3 hour call with him and he took 10 pages of
notes, bless 'im.  that his head didn't explode or steam come out his
ears is a good sign.


> I'm most interested in gaining knowledge and experience working on a hardware
> project.

ya picked a Monster, you do realise that, right? :)

> I have limited experience with Assembly and Verilog as well as
> extensive experience with c/c++

oo, good.  this will come in real handy, there are 3D drivers to do,
we need a c/c++ simulator for SimpleV (on top of an existing POWERPC
simulator), there's linux kernel drivers and blah blah.


> but I am excited to learn Nmigen and hope
> to contribute to the Power Core.

excellent.  well Cole's been through the process already, we threw him
in the deep end and he hasn't sunk yet :)  i find it hilarious that he
knew nothing about gate-level design so we found (or wrote) some
tutorials and he went through them, came back and said, "ok now what?"
:)

i recommend reading this - it will give you some background and insights:
https://libre-soc.org/3d_gpu/tutorial/

you've done verilog, that's a really good start.  try this one, it's
very good - an introduction to nmigen:

    https://github.com/RobertBaruch/nmigen-tutorial

basically jump to the end of this page and go through them one by one
https://libre-soc.org/HDL_workflow/

once you've done *that*, then there are two *relatively* simple
pipelines that need work:
https://bugs.libre-soc.org/show_bug.cgi?id=348
https://bugs.libre-soc.org/show_bug.cgi?id=325

and - jacob's working on DIV, so hypothetically MUL is free:
https://bugs.libre-soc.org/show_bug.cgi?id=323


> I am also the one who created the visual
> slides for the pitch last week

niiice :)

> and would like to help with the Elm
> Kanban/bug tracker visual front end for Bugzilla.

this was just an idea which Cole and i sort-of went "hmm that would be
useful" and i'd honestly forgotten about - if you can raise a
bugreport about it on bugs.libre-soc.org under the "website" product
that would be really useful.  ask Cole for help, there.


> I have read and agreed to the charter.

excellent.

ok so you've probably patiently read this https://libre-soc.org/HDL_workflow/

and Cole either already has the dev-environment set up on his dev
machine: if you have your own machine _great_, do ask him to help you
get set up.  also if you dare be awake at 6am on Wednesday it would be
good to have you also on the Marketnext call, we will do some
introduction then and go over things that you should also be aware of.

great to have you on board.

warmest,

l.