[J-core] Did you notice the github?

[Rob Landley]

On 9/9/19 1:07 PM, Brian Bartholomew wrote:
>> We're trying to coordinate getting all the J-Core projects wheels back on.
> 
> J-core, you're back! I've been faithfully dusting my Numato all these months.

Sorry I didn't see this, it wound up in gmail's spam filter, just fished it out.

Yeah, we never quite stopped working but we slowed way down. We're back now,
grinding away at it.

I'm up in Canada with Jeff through the 10th, we're doing a new run of Turtle
boards and gluing a 640x480x16 (64k color) framebuffer to the turtle bitstream,
implementing a page faulter for ice40 (which reads flash cache lines into sram
so you can execute from flash), simplifying stages 2 and 3 of the five stage
pipeline, and so on...

Haven't opened the j32 can of worms yet. (Niishi's done over a year of work we
need to merge and publish, but we need a Linux port to properly test it...)
We're trying to get the 2 test boards up on crowdsupply first, then other people
can follow along more easily.

>> We're working on getting our current RTL (not the 2016 version)
>> ready for release. Full SMP with MMU and so also quite a bit
>> larger... needs some open hardware to go with it.
>
> Like a laptop. Does the ICE40 port mean you have an open FPGA
> compiler working?

We have an open compiler potentially working: GHDL grew towards yosys and may
have filled in the gaps. (They finally got back to us saying they'd fixed our
bug reports from a year ago.) But unfortunately to test that we need to build an
ADA compiler from source (the published GHDL binaries aren't built in this mode)
and work down a dependency tree, which we haven't done yet.

Jeff can probably point people at it if you want to try yourself though, it's
all published and out there...

Rob