[GTALUG] Western Digital's open source RISC-V core

[Christopher Browne]

On Thu, 14 Mar 2019 at 15:30, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk at 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-targets-risc-v-development/

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?"
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