36c3 intro music
[Filler, please remove ina mara]
Herald: Welcome everybody to our next
talk: Linux on open source hardware with
open source chip design. Who here in the
audience uses Linux? please short sign of
hands, feels like almost 100 percent, I
would say. OK. A hundred percent of people
use Linux. So who have you use it on open
hardware? We are pleased. Another show of
hands. Yeah, that's not too many. Who have
you would like to use it on open hardware?
And I guess that's why you're here. So I'm
glad that we have Drew Fustini here. Our
new speaker. He's a open source hardware
designer and embedded Linux developer and
also the vice president of the Open Source
Software Association. And who better to
tell you how to run your Linux on open
source hardware? Please welcome Drew with
a big, warm round of applause and have fun
with this talk. Thank you very much.
applause
Thank you.
Applause
Drew: I'll skip past my introduction. It's
Congress, so probably most people are
familiar with open source. So before I
jump into what open source hardware is,
just want to frame it in the context. If
people aren't familiar with open source
is. So, examples that are Linux apparently
always running Linux in this room, which
is great. Underneath Android, there's
Linux as well. LibreOffice which I use to
make this presentation is also open
source. Firefox the web browsers open
source. So we're probably all very
familiar with open source software and
open source refers to something that you
can modify and share because the design is
publicly accessible. So with software
we're talking about that you can inspect
and modify and enhance the source code. So
in the terms of, When we talk about open
source, there's a couple different terms
that people use. They might use free or
Libre or open source and those do have
different philosophical backgrounds. For
the purposes of this talk, I'm going to
conflate those terms and I'm just going to
refer to it as open source hardware.
Though some people use the terms free
hardware, libre hardware, open hardware.
But I'm just going to using the term open
source hardware for this talk. So open
source hardware is hardware whose design
is made publicly available so that anyone
can study, modify, distribute, make and
sell that the design or hardware based on
the design. So this is a definition that
we came up with about 10 years ago at an
event called the Open Hardware Summit.
People that were making hardware projects,
we got together and tried to come up with
a definition of what we wanted it to mean.
So I mostly do electronics, though. Open
hardware and open source hardware is more
than just that. It can be mechanical
design, basically any physical object
where you have design files that you could
share. But just to give you an example in
the context of electronics what where
we're talking about is this schematic, the
board layout and then the building
materials, the parts list. And we're not
just talking about an output file like a
PDF or our graphic file of the schematic
or Gerber is for the board layout. We're
talking about editable source file from
the from the CAD software. So something
like Eagle or a KiCAD. And then one of the
things that's good to do with the bill
materials is if you want to enable other
people deal to build your project, it's
good to make sure that the components are
available in low quantity. This isn't a
strict requirement of the definition of
open source hardware, but if you want
people to build a build your project and
it's important to make sure that they can
build it in in low quantities. So many
people have heard of Arduino. OK, good.
Good number of people in the room. So
Arduino was a microcontroller board that
was created at small school in Italy like
over 10 years ago. And it became super
popular because they, it was good enough
at the time to do a lot of different
interactive electronics projects and they
shared the hardware design and the code on
the Internet. And it just kind of achieved
critical mass. A lot of people took it and
modified it for different projects,
different use cases. At the beginning, I
had a link there to the slides. Also, if
you pull up the talk page, there's a link
to the slides as well. I have a lot of
links in these slides. Something that is
interesting as there was a documentary
back when Arduino was starting about the
team. Just went to check out to see what
see what things were like when that was
starting. So one of the most popular
Arduino boards is the UNO, which you see a
picture of there. So how do we know that
the UNO is open source hardware? Well, if
we go to the Arduino Web site, we can see
that the design files from Eagle, which is
the CAD software they use, is there and we
can download that zip file and it has the
schematic and the board layout. Now, when
we're releasing our design files for a
hardware project, we need to choose a
license. And there is a lot of different
options when it comes to licenses. One is
the Creative Commons suite of licenses. So
one common one, you might see people use
that CC-BY means attribution and then
share like essay say. One thing to note is
if you had the noncommercial attribute,
then that makes it not open source. In
this slide there's a link to a good blog
post that kind of explains why if he had
noncommercial clause, it no longer
conforms to the the definition of open
source. Other people use things like copy
left licenses or reciprocal licenses like
GPL and also permissive licenses like
Apache and BSD and MIT. And then there's
licenses that were created specifically
for hardware projects, one of which is the
CERN Open Higher License, which I want to
talk more about specifically. So CERN, the
physics laboratory here in Europe, they
have a open hardware repository. So
they're developing these electronics. And
actually there was two great talks here in
Congress from a couple electronics
engineers that work on the electronics
there. So they're building electronics for
their physics experiments and they want to
share that with other labs around the
world. So they have an open hardware
repository. And as part of that, they
created the open hardware license and kind
of give some background on this. One of
the people that runs the team there is
Javier Serrano. He gave a cool interview
that's linked in the slides where he talks
about their motivation behind this and in
why they have the open hardware repository
and create the license. Though this can
get kind of confusing, there's not just
licenses, there's also copyright and
patents. At the Open Hardware Summit a few
years ago Ari Douglas gave a nice talk
about this so you can find that talk in
the link there in the slides. He goes over
what might be good for your project,
depending on what purposes you're trying
to achieve with your own project and kind
of goes over the different options there.
But what's the whole point of all this? So
the reason you might want to make your
project open source hardware is that you
want to enable collaborative development.
So we're talking about the idea here is
that you're going to share your design
files in your hoping other people will
help to contribute to your project,
contribute to the design of your hardware.
So I would say that's like the main reason
to release the design files for your
project is open source hardware. If you're
not interested in other people
collaborating on your project, then it
might not be the right thing for your
project. So it's good to consider whether
or not you want to have other people
contribute to your project. So I
mentioned, well it was mentioned at the
beginning: I'm part of the Open Source
Hardware Association. So we're a nonprofit
based in the US, even though we do have
board members around the world. We have
Mathias, who's one of our board members in
Vienna. I'm actually based in Berlin now
as well. So one of the things we do is we
host the definition of what open source
hardware is. We also have things like best
practices guide, a checklist that you can
go through to see if you're releasing all
the things you need to for open source
hardware project. But the main thing that
we do is we helped organize this event
called the Open Hardware Summit, and
that's going to be coming up in March of
2020 in New York City. So hope to see some
of you there if you can make it. This will
be our tenth one. And so we started in
2010. This year, though, we decided to do
something a little bit different. So we
had Open Hardware Month. So Idea with this
is, we wanted to have people from around
the world do locally organized meet ups
and talks and workshops that kicked off
with one in some in Vienna and Colorado in
the US. And it was really cool. We had 40
events in 14 different countries and we'll
be doing it again in 2020. So hopefully
some of you can get involved with events
wherever you're located. And if you're
wondering what happens with the Open
Hardware Summit, you can check out the
talks from our last one, which was in
2018. Give you an idea of what happens
there. In kind of some insight into the
different sorts of the projects people are
doing. I do a lot electronics, but there's
a lot more than that. There's people that
are doing science and art and design, all
sorts of different things. One of the
other things we do with the Officers Heart
Association is we have a certification
program. So this is self certification
program. You got a
"certificate.oshwa.org". And you you fill
out the name, your project, the license
you're using linked to your design files,
linked to your documentation, and then you
get this logo that you can use. And kind
of one of the value of this, if you're
making a project, is you can put that on
your packaging or I put it on like the
silk screen of my board. So then people
can really easily identify that it's open
hardware and then they can go to that Web
site and they can type an I.D. number and
be able to pull up the page that links
them to the documentation, the design
files. And then for people that are
looking for like I want a certain type of
device and I want to find one that's open
source hardware. If you see this logo, you
can go and look that up in the database
and find out more about it. So if you're
interested and know more about the Open
Source Hardware Association, you can go to
"oshwa.org". You can join as a member of
the association. We also have a mailing
list and a forum. If you want to check us
out on Twitter, the "@OHsummit" is the
Open Hardware Summit account, where we
have a lot of activity going on right now
about that because it's coming up in
March. Mean, our executive director,
Alicia Gib, who's one of the people that
started this summit, she wrote a book
called Building Open Source Hardware, and
it has essays from different people that
have built open hardware projects. So it's
a good thing to check out if you're
wanting to see what different experiences
people have had with that. So the point of
all, the kind, the main theme of this talk
was about Linux on open source hardware,
which is my two favorite things. So one of
my favorite projects was developed by
Bunnie, who gave an awesome talk on the
first day here at Congress. And Sean Cross
(xobs) he was giving a workshop right now
on the FOMU. So this was a completely open
source laptop for everything, including
the all the electronics were were open
source. And at the time when this came
out, like four or five years ago, it was
it was a pretty decent system. I have one
and I used it for for many years. So this
is a really cool idea of having a laptop
that I can use every day. That's open
hardware. And it had some cool features
like an FPGA and a software defined radio.
And then if you're wondering what's kind
of coming up next, if you go to the CDC,
CDC area here at Congress, you can see the
reform laptop. So Lucas from MNT is there.
He has this is a completely open source
hardware laptop. The electronics, the
mechanical design, everything. So I
recommend you go check that out. It's
really cool. It's in the CDC area, which
is the critical decentralized cluster. So
one of the other things I'm involved with
is a "beagleboard.org". So we're a
nonprofit organization that helps design
open hardware computers. That is
everything for people from makers to
students, even Professionals that are
designing into their projects. And what we
do is we work with different manufacturers
and we also work with the community to
come up with designs that are useful. So
this started off with the Beagle Board
back in 2008, so this was kind of the
first low cost ARM development board. In
back at that time a lot of people were
needing ARM hardware to port their free
software and open source software to ARM,
and the board was pretty popular for that.
We followed it up with littleler board
called the BeagleBone, which fits into the
old toys tin, if you've seen those mid
tins, if you've probably used the
BeagleBone your probably most really with
the beagle bone black, which was, I would
say still our most popular board. So kind
of the theme here is because it's open
source hardware, there's a whole bunch of
different BeagleBones made by different
manufacturers with different features and
different price points like a SeedStudio
decided probably most people don't care
about HDMI, so they took the HDMI off to
save some cost. Arrow wanted to make one
that worked with industrial temps, so they
it's a little bit more expensive, but it
has industrial temp components on it. And
then one of the things that's important
with open source hardware is we want
people to be able to take the design files
and make derivatives. So we have this
smaller one called the PocketBeagle. The
cool thing about this is a pretty simple
circuit board. It has something called the
system in package that integrates a lot of
the chips. So it makes the board layout
really simple. So this is just a four
layer circuit board and it's available in
Eagle and also in Key CAD. And if you have
some experience like if you go over to the
hardware hacking area, you can learn to do
surface mount assembly and with a little
bit of experience, you could order the
board, order the parts and build your own.
Or as Kumar did, he wanted to make a logic
analyzer board. So he took the design of
the PocketBeagle and he added on the
features he needed, like the inputs for
the probes. And he also added a gigabit
networking. So this is kind of cool to see
people take the design in the PocketBeagle
and then modify it for their project for
their use case. And here's an example of
the the logo. So the latest boy we had was
the BeagleBone AI. So we registered that
back in the summer. So it's US because it
was registered in the US as a country code
and then it's 169. So it's just like a
sequential number. So it's easy for people
to identify if they go to the git hub. OK.
It's open source hardware certified and
then it links off to the page with the
database with information about it. So I
wanted to mention, Olimex we're here in
Europe. And, you know, in Bulgaria is one
of the best open hardware companies, in my
opinion. And they have a line of open
source hardware, Linux computers called
the OLinux. We know. And the person behind
Olimex fed. has a great blog post about
open source hardware and why it matters to
them. So a few years ago, they wanted to
create a ARM 64 bit ARM board that was
completely open source and designed in
KiCAD, which is a free software open
source circuit design software. Tsvetan
and gave a nice talk at FOSDEM a few years
ago about the process of them switching
from their proprietary CAD software over
to KiCAD and designing this open source
hardware board. So and then if you've not
heard of KiCAD before or KiCAD doesn't
really matter what you say. Some people
say "Keycad" some people say "kaicad" but
it's open source software for designing
circuit boards. It's cross platform runs
on Macs, Windows and Linux. And one of the
cool things about it now is. There's
developers at CERN that are working on it.
And the project leader, Wayne, is now
working on a full time is this job. So
it's cool to see a lot of the developers
now being able to do it as their day job.
So it's kind of getting critical mass in
that way. And if you want to try it out, I
recommend if you search on YouTube for
"Getting to Blinky", it's a nice tutorial
about teaches you how to go through and
make a little board that blinks an LED. So
Olimex took that board that they designed
in KiCAD, the OLinux we know, a 64, and
they wanted to make a laptop with it. So
that's called the terrorists One the
design files are git hub for it. So the
idea there is to make a modular laptop
that people can put different boards in
and things like that. Another interesting
open hardware project was the "chip",
which you might have heard of, it was
built as a nine dollar computer. They had
a really successful Kickstarter back in
2015. Unfortunate that company went on a
business in 2018 three years later. But
the cool thing about it was it was all
open source hardware, the schematics, the
PCB, the build materials. And if you see
here, there is this really cool thing
called the pocket ship, which was this
nice like handheld little Linux computer.
It was really cool. But the company went
to business, which was unfortunate. But
this one person, Christopher, he goes by
"Groguard". He designed his own board that
plugs into the pocket chip. And if you
click on the link in the slides, you can
see doom running on it, which is like, oh,
it's the demo that you show with a Linux
system. Then he went and designed this
other board, which is pretty cool, so this
fits into a popular form factor for
microcontroller boards called the Adafruit
Feather form Factor. And this is a full
Linux system. And you can. It's fully open
source and there is a crowdfunding
campaign for it. That happened earlier
this year. So one of the things I also
want to talk about, especially here at
Congress, is the idea of open source and
FPGAs. Then Well, I'll tell you about how
that plays into Linux. So being the really
cool things that's happened over the last
couple years and many some of the people
here, Congress have been a part of that.
Like Clifford Wolff and David Shaw, and
other people have built free software
tools that allows you to not have to use
the proprietary tools from the FPGA
vendors kind of wrote a Overview of this
and recent issue with hacks based
magazine. You can download the PDF for
free if you want to check that out. And
one of the talks at Congress a few years
ago was from Clifford Wolf. So this kind
of all started off with this one FPGA
called the iCE40. And he wrote kind of
over time wrote different pieces of
software that you need to be able to take
your design and put it onto an FPGA. So
that was for a part called the iCE40. So
that was Project Ice Storm. And then a few
years later. David Shaw primarily helped
develop open source software that lets you
put onto a more capable part called the
ECP5. And then most recently, there's a
there's project x-ray and another project
called Symbol Flow that's been working on
bringing open source tools to higher end
of FPGAs. These Xilinx Series 7 FPGA,
they're going to add a lot more
capabilities. So why is this important for
Linux? Well, if we have an FPGA that's
capable enough, we can put a soft core in
there and then we can potentially run
Linux on that soft core. So Greg is here
at Congress and he designed this really
cool board. This also an Adafruit form
factor called the orange crab. And
actually yesterday he got Linux to run on
it, which was really fun. So this is a
open source hardware board. You can
download the designs of the board and it's
using a soft core in a FPGA to run Linux.
One of the other boards came out of a
hackerspace in Croatia "radiona.org", and
that's also using the ECP5 FPGA and that's
capable of running Linux as well. And
they're doing about to do a crowdfunding
campaign now so you can check that out on
"crowdsupply". And David Shaw was one of
the open source developers. He created
this "ultimate" board called the 'Trellis
Board', which I think would be probably
pretty attractive for running Linux. I
think it has a gigabyte of DDR memories of
its pretty substantial system for running
Linux and its open source. You can
download the plans and build it. And then
recently, back in November, there was the
Hackaday Super Conference and everyone at
the conference got this badge, which was
kind like this Gameboy form factor, but it
has the ECP5 FPGA that allows us to have a
soft core on there and run Linux. So kind
of some different options of open hardware
boards that are using soft cores in FPGA
is to run Linux. And then one of the
people over in the open FPGA assembly here
at Congress is a pretty cool picture, as I
was talking about, like a soft core. Well,
what does that look like when it's an
FPGA? So this is kind of a cool picture of
what it looks like when all those
different gates are laid out inside the
FPGA to have a Linux capable processor
core. So one of the ways that we do this
is so we talk about a soft core, well, how
do you make that? And one of the important
pieces software that all these boards that
was is showing you use is a project called
"LiteX". So this is a pretty interesting
way of creating a system on chip inside
the FPGA. An extra uses a Python based
language called Migen. And if you're
interested in it, I'd recommend checking
out this blog posts from Bunnie where he
talks about the advantages of it. And it
gives you things like it gives you like a
DRAM controller, Ethernet controller, PCI
controller SATA controller so you can take
those pieces of IP and put them together
for what you need for your project. And
then in terms of the soft core we can, one
of the things that LiteX gives you is the
ability to run a RISC-V soft core. So that
project's called LiteX on Linux or Linux
on LiteX, and that's what the Orange Crab
is using in the HackaDay badge and those
other projects, the radio and a board.
That's how it's running. There's a couple
of projects that are doing similar things
as well. But the Linux on LiteX is one of
the ones that a lot of people are using
and a screenshot of what it looks like
when it boots up. So I was already kind of
talking about RISC-V a bit and if you're
not familiar with it. You probably heard
of like x86 intelx86 or ARM. That's an
instructions that it's the instructions
that the processor executes. You write
code, it gets compiled into instructions
that run on the processor. So RISC-V is an
instructions set that came out of
university, California, Berkeley, in it's
a free and open source instruction set. So
anyone can take this instruction set and
implemented in a in a chip like an FPGA or
actually make a actual silicon chip. So
one of these examples of this is there are
there's a university in Columbia and they
decided to make their own microcontroller
based on RISC-V called the Open-V. So this
is really cool. It was fully open sourced
chip then design of the whole chip is open
source and it can run the RISC-V
instruction set. However, it's not quite
good enough to, or it's not capable enough
to run Linux and fortunately gets more
meant for microcontroller applications.
Another organization is called "lowRISC"
and they were kind of founded with the
idea of being able to create a RISC-V
based system on chip tech could do
something like be a basic smartphone. So
they're still working on that. But I am
pretty excited this will happen in the
future there. One of the people that
started lowRISC is Alex Bradbury, and he
gave a interesting talk a few months ago
about the future of operating systems on
RISC-V. So I recommend checking that out
if you're interested in like the ecosystem
of the tool chains involved in things like
that. So similar to Oshwa. There is a
organization for chip design called
"FOSSi", which is the free and open source
Silicon Foundation, and they do a great
job of putting together all these
different projects into events. They have
one called Orconf, which happens every
year here in Europe. They also have a
conference now in the US called Latch-Up.
That's going to be coming up in April at
M.I.T. They also host a web site, called
"LibreCores". So people are designing this
open source chip designs or IP blocks for
things like Ethernet or memory
controllers. And if you. They created
LibreCores as a site that you can share
those. And so if I'm going to build an
open source chip, I can go in there and
find different blocks or functionality I
need. There was also an event earlier this
year called the Week of Open Source
Hardware. So this is all hosted by Fossi.
They have all the talks online from these
conferences if you want to check them out.
So one of the companies that was founded
by some of the people that created the
RISC-V instruction set is called SiFive,
and they've actually produced a few
commercial chips, one of which is this
microcontroller here. And one of the co-
founders and CTOs has a interesting talk
about their RISC-V ecosystem. And so like
companies like Western Digital have
decided to switch all the core in their
drives over to RISC-V. And NVIDIA has
decided to take out a little
microcontrollers in their GPUs and turn
those over to RISC-V as well. This is a
microcontroller board based on that SiFive
microcontroller, which is quite
interesting, but unfortunately can't run
Linux on it. So one of the surprises last
year at Fossdem was Palmer from SiFive
debut this board called the HiFive
Unleashed. So this is a multi core 64 bit
board that can run Linux. It runs it
really well. The one downside to this is
it was meant to be an evaluation board, so
it's quite expensive if it's a thousand
dollars. So in it, they're not going to
ever make it in volume. So a little
disappointing, but that. The other option
there. So there's these high end boards
like this one. It's kind of expensive
because it's made in low volume. There's
also some cheap microcontrollers. One is
called the, from Kendait the KT10. It is
basically a microcontroller with a lot of
memory. And it, there is possibility to
run Linux on it. So add Linux plumbers
this year when the people from Western
Digital gave a talk about running Linux on
this kind of essentially a
microcontroller. You can check out that
link there. There's a talk about it and
there's slides from the conference.
They're also in the Lenny's kernel. They
started adding support to be able to run
Linux on these RISC-V, essentially
microcontrollers. It's not great, but it's
kind of like we're gonna have to work what
we have with what. We have to work with,
what we have right now. If you're
interested more in more about how Linux
runs on RISC-V, then you can check out
this talk from hot chips a few months ago
and it goes into like how the Linux kernel
works on RISC-V. And the other cool thing
is both Debian and Fedora have initial
distributions now for RISC-V. And if you
don't have hardware like that unleashed
board, you can still try this out on your
computer using an emulator called QEMU. So
one of things is exciting is like two
weeks ago at the RISC-V summit in
California NXP announced that there's
going to be a chip early next year that's
going to be a Linux capable SoC. So this
is quite exciting. This could allow us to
make like a board that wouldn't be too
expensive and be pretty high performance.
So one of things I want to hopefully maybe
be a part of or encourage people to do is
make a board that's less than one hundred
dollars that runs risk five. One route is
we use FPGA as another route is maybe when
this chip comes out, there'd be a
possibility and then could we do it by the
next CCC? I don't know if you're
interested in this. Get in touch. I would
like to try and get a community effort
going around this idea of making a RISC-V
board that can run Linux. So I don't know
if I have any time left, but I'm happy to
take questions.
[filler please remove in amara]
applause
[filler please remove in amara]
Herald: Thanks, Drew, yes. We actually do
have some time left. Actually, about 10
minutes. So if you do have questions, pile
up at the microphones that you see here.
And we start with a question from the
Internet. Sure. Take your time. Just start
talking into the microphone. Yeah. Why is
the microphone off the signal angel not
working? All right. We just started with a
question from microphone number two then,
while the signal angel is working out his
microphone. There you go.
Mic 2: Hi. Is this working? Yes.
Herald: Move close to the microphone.
touches the microphone
Herald: It is on, It is on.
Mic 2: Hi, Drew. Thank you very much.
Thanks very much for the talk. I've been
having a lot of fun using your pocket
beguiling combination with the Bella
system.
Drew: Oh?
Mic 2: Actually, I've been able to get it
on stage on the Royal Albert Hall earlier
this year. And one of the things I'm
really enthused about in that project is
that using the center of my realtime
operating system. It really seems super.
Yeah. The breach between the low latency
performance of a microprocessor and the
the Octopus connects to everything in low
entry to development of Linux world. As
you see more of these examples using
?????? or order.
Drew: Yeah. So just to give people that
are familiar with the terms a little bit
of background, ??????????, essentially
this co kernel, it runs alongside Linux
and allows you to do like real time tasks
like in this case audio like low latency
audio for instruments or other things like
doing motor control. The Linux kernel
developers have been doing a lot of work
of getting the Linux kernel to run great
with real time tasks, but depends on what
your deadlines are. So for things like
building instruments, those are pretty
latency sensitive and ?????????? running
around of doing that. So if you're
interested in other projects called
Machine Kit, it's an open source CMC
controller. They simply have deadlines
like having to read a motoring coder or
send out pulses to a stepper motor. So,
you know, I think it really did. So with
real time things is what you're talking
about. It really depends on what your
deadlines are like. So in the case of
Bella, they're still using ?????????
because they need to be, they need a
certain minimum latency, that they can
still only achieve with that. But I will
say with the linux kernel, there's been a
lot of work that's been going on. And the
linux kernel was much better than it used
to be in terms of handling real time
tasks.
Mic 2: OK, cool.
Drew: And if you're interested in Bella, I
think there's someone from the team here
in the room, so..
Mic 2: Really?
Drew: Yeah, you can have..
Herald: The person identifying is
themselves here. All right.
Mic 2: Thank you.
Herald: Thanks for the question. Thanks
for the answer. Let's have another try
with the Internet?
Signal Angel: Is using open source
software hardware design required or
enforced to get the open hardware
certification?
Drew: Yeah, that's a really good question,
which I didn't clarify enough. So
according to the open source hardware
definition that we have from Oshawa, you
can use whatever software you want. One of
the reasons is for certain types of
things, especially like mechanical design,
proprietary software is still the norm.
This is also the case with circuit design.
Kicad has only really got in like really
good and stable probably the last five
years. So kind of as a matter of
practicality, 10 years ago, like most
people were still using proprietary
software to design mechanical designs and
software designs. Ideally, I think, you
know, if the ideas you want enable
collaboration, using free software, using
open source software would enable as many
people as possible to be able to
contribute to your project. But it is not
according to our definition that we have
hosted on Oshawa, is not a requirement. So
say best practice, use free software but
it is not required.
Herald: Thanks. Microphone number one,
please.
Mic 1: How far is the performance for
everyday computing on RISC-V. Like can I
run my everyday programing toolchain on a
RISC-V processor?
Drew: You could run it? The one downside
to the soft core is on these FPGA is so
like the ECP 5 which I mentioned, it's
only running at maybe 50 megahertz, 100
megahertz. One of the reasons I brought up
cymbal flow and project x ray is that's
going to enable us to use open source
tools on these higher end Xilinx FPGAs
which will unlock greater performance
still with soft cores. It's going to be if
you're looking to be competitive with like
ARM and Intel, it's not going to be there.
But one of the cool things that think
about is an FPGA. So you have a lot of
flexibility like in terms of the
peripherals you can do, you know, so kind
of getting creative in terms of, well,
maybe the clock speeds aren't really fast,
but it's enough PGA so you could add
hardware accelerators to do things that
you might otherwise be burning cycles on
our processor to do. But that's also why
I'm hoping people will start making chips.
I'm excited about that. And XP
announcement because yeah, like we need
silicon to have like the performance that
we're used to on like ARM and Intel.
Herald: Thanks. We have yet another
question from the Internet.
Signal Angel: Do you think it's feasible
to create a package manager for open
hardware like paper or NPM?
Drew: That is a good question and I think
one of the things that I would say like
open, open hardware is almost kind of like
20 years behind open source software. And
I think one of the reasons is a lot of the
tools that people use for designing
hardware. It's difficult to collaborate on
designs. You know, a lot of these CAD
programs like it's not the same as like
source code, like, you know, I store all
my hardware designs in github. But if I
look at like the diffs in git, like, you
know, they're not very meaningful. So I
think one of the issues we have is for
people to collaborate and hardware like we
need better tools that allowed us to track
changes. And in Nick do puri question
merges in a more meaningful way. So I'm
sure everyone here that sees CAD tools and
tried to work with other people. It can be
it can be difficult. So I think that's an
area that can be improved in terms of like
hosting things. You know, I just talked to
someone today that talked about the Open
Source Hardware Observatory where they
were trying to like collect lots of
different projects. So I think we can
definitely have Web sites that like show
what projects are out there. But in terms
of like being able to like collaborate on
things like libre course, check out libre
course, they're trying to do that as well
for processor design, being able to go on
there and like grab either net controller
or a memory controller in a way, actually
a chip design almost better because if you
look at the hardware design languages,
it's more like source code. But yeah.
Kicad is difficult to collaborate on
still, I think.
Herald: All righty. Microphone number one,
please.
Mic 1: During the presentation, you
mentioned that there are several great
products trying to develop software for
FPGA for commercial FPGA devices. I was
wondering if you are aware of any products
trying to develop open source FPGA
architecture or something similar to
RISC-V instruction set about for a FPG
world?
Drew: Right. So yeah. The other thing here
is so we're talking about open source
tools for getting things on to FPGAs, but
there's also the idea of like the open
source chip design. So I don't personally
I'm not heard of any like projects where
they're trying to do like an open source
FPGA. But I think if you if you have time
stopped by the open FPGA assembly and also
over and in the hardware hacking area. Tim
and Tim and Sloan's jobs are over there.
And they they know a lot about things that
are happening there as well. But I think
it would be cool and Bunny's talk here at
Congress on the first day was about the
idea of like using FPGA is because they're
more easier to inspect in if we can make
like an open source FPGA chip. I think
they'd be in better.
Herald: Another question from the
Internet, please?
Signal Angel: What about performance per
watt?
Drew: I'm sorry?
Signal Angel: What about performance per
watt?
Drew: With RISC-V or FPGA or..
Signal Angel: Both I think.
Drew: Both, yeah. Probably FPGA is not
great with that because, you know, as
compared to an asic or silicon design they
are not as power efficient. RISC-V, I
don't know. I've not seen a whole lot of
numbers around that. You know, I think
it's still kind of early days when it
comes to RISC-V. Also, like a lot of it's
still soft cores and FPGAs, but you're not
going to be as great in terms of power.
But there is a project out of ETH Zürich
of the university called Pulp P U L P and
it stands for parallel ultra low power. So
that's a family of RISC-V cores. So check
out pulp from ETH Zürich. I think they're
trying to do low power things.
Herald: Good question, though. Microphone
number one.
Mic 1: Thanks for the great talk. So as
you mentioned, there's a lot of NDAing and
copyrighting going on in the hardware
world. So one of the slides you showed
showed the risk 5 quad with an ??
interface next to it. So my question is,
do we have all the components, the
peripheral components to make a full
processor, on open source? So it there
still gaps in there?
Drew: I think there's still a lot of work
to be done there. And that's something
that Light X is trying to do like to pull
together these different IP blocks you
need to build the system on CHIP. Same
thing with libre of cause. But if you take
a look at ??? 5, like not everything. So
the core is open source, but in order to
tape out a chip that had certain
functionality like not all of the IP on
there is open source. So I think that is
something that hopefully in the future as
more people start doing open source IP for
chip design, we can hopefully have all the
different blocks that we need to make a
chip like one of the things CY 5 is
missing on their chips is, is USB, you
know, traditionally people like it will
get like USB controller from mentor
synopsis or something like that. So having
good, you know, verified, proven IP for
these common peripherals is important. So
yeah, it might be an open core, but then
it might have proprietary blocks around
it. So there's a lot of room there for
improvement, I think.
Herald: And with that, we're wrapping up.
Thank you very much for all of your
interesting questions. Also, thank you
very much for all the angels working here.
Thank you very much. To all the people
from Messe Leipzig, the Audio Video people
who work. And of course, the biggest thank
you again to Drew. Thank you very much for
the awesome talk. Another big, warm round
of applause, please. Thank you.
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