[J-core] newbie

[Rob Landley]

On 08/26/2017 09:00 PM, Cedric BAIL wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Kind of hijacking the thread, but there are interesting bit there :-)

Oh hijack away.

We're trying to get back to the point we can more regularly engage this
list, and have interesting things to say here. Alas right now we're
regularly engaging customers and have to come up with interesting things
to say to _them_ more or less daily right now. (And then they give us
money. Looking forward to that part.)

> On Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 11:46 PM, Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:
>> We _sort_ of have a modular build design that let you treat the SOC as a
>> set of discrete components that slot together like legos. Except you
>> can't in reality, and the whole thing desperately needs a config system
>> (various makefile targets have been implemented by hand; it should be
>> automated and selectable), and there's layers of build dependencies you
>> have to install depending on what you enable, and we have a whole build
>> system revamp we want to do to make the modular build design goal
>> _actually_ the case. (Which also helps with the ASIC since that has to
>> be validated by the fab in discrete chunks, but that got bumped back by
>> ~6 months because we needed to pull the engineers off to do other stuff
>> for customers with nearer deadlines first.)
> 
> I have, for other project, started to use meson/ninja as a build
> system and the result has been really nice and fast. Would
> definitively look into that direction for a configuration system, this
> may be orthogonal to have a menuconfig kind of interface for the SoC
> itself.

The android guys switched oevr to ninja and I've been meaning to look at
it for toybox, but my attempts to poke at it hit bad version skew:

http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2017-June/009071.html

And it went back on the todo list...

> <snip>
> 
>> Right now, we're trying to ship boards to customers...
> 
> Is that the board you were talking about earlier in June that was the
> reason for the delay of the turtle ? If so, do you have some updated
> deadline for the turtle also ?

A) Yes, B) that's a question for Jen, Jeff, or Martin.

(I'm a software guy. Even when the customer boards get out of
manufacturing, I don't get one. I've got a development board, not a
production board. Different form factor entirely and missing several
features from the deployment boards that don't matter for what I'm
working on.)

I know that finishing and shipping this darn thing _unblocks_ turtle.
How much they can overlap: not a clue, not my area. Sorry.

> Thanks,

Rob