[J-core] Fwd: My trip to Japan

[Joh-Tob Schäg]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Joh-Tob Schäg <johtobsch at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 28 Dec 2019 at 16:51
Subject: Re: [J-core] My trip to Japan
To: John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz at physik.fu-berlin.de>


On Sat, 28 Dec 2019 at 16:12, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
<glaubitz at physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> On 12/26/19 10:43 PM, Joh-Tob Schäg wrote:
> > time. During the occasion i received a turtle board with some binaries
> > . I am free to talk about it, so if you have questions ask me. The
>
> Are Turtle boards already available for purchase for interested developers?

I am not part of CoreSemi so i can not comment on their commercial
decisions. Jeff told me that they want to fix a few things with the
board before they do another run for a crowdsupply campaign. I
explained what i know in the last paragraph of my previous email.

>
> > FPGA came flashed with a dual core J32. Jeff also showed me how to
> > reflash the FPGA. It has a dedicated flash mode which can be triggered
> > at start-up. In the flash mode the board talks over serial and has an
> > assistant for flashing an image form the µSD card.
> > The linux build that came with it did not support J32 yet which means
> > it crashes when mmap is called. (I understood from Robs explanation
> > that this expected behaviour when running a nommu kernel on a device
> > with MMU).
>
> J32 would be equivalent to SH4, wouldn't it? If yes, I'm really looking
> forward to that. Having new SH4 hardware available for purchase would
> help Debian's sh4 port (of which I am the principal maintainer of) and
> NetBSD's port for sh3/sh4.

J32 should be equivalent to SH3/SH4-noFPU.
I could not confirm that yet during independent testing. I am not that
familiar with the differences in the SuperH family.

>
> For Debian, I'm currently building most packages for sh4 using qemu-user
> which has some bugs meaning that not all packages build fine which other-
> wise build fine on real hardware. So, I'm really looking forward for new
> sh4-compatible hardware.

So there will be a sudden jump in the number of packages that build
fine if you get a turtle?
I used the debian graph of percent building to show that SuperH is not
dead yet. I would be happy if the situation is actually better than it
looks now.