London Open Source Meetup for RISC-V - 20/01/20

[Sevan Janiyan <venture37%geeklan.co.uk@localhost>]

Registration link: https://ossg200120.eventbrite.co.uk/

At this evening meeting we have three talks on the MaxineVM on RISC-V,
Embench on RISC-V and open source licensing with RISC-V.  One of our
speakers, Florin-Gabriel Blanaru, was winner of the inaugural RISC-V
Student of the Year competition.  At this meeting he will be presented
with his award and then speak about his work. The presentation will be
made by Mary Bennett, Chair of the RISC-V Foundation University Outreach
committee.

Note. This meeting is at the new BCS London offices, 25 Copthall Ave,
EC2R 7BP.

The talks will be live streamed and available on afterwards on the BCS
Open Source Specialist Group YouTube channel.

Eventbrite - Open Source SG - London Open Source Meetup for RISC-V

Tea/coffee will be served from 6:00pm, with talks starting at 6:30pm.
Each talk will last around 30 minutes and include plenty of time for
questions, after which there will be opportunity to network both in the
BCS  and later at the Globe pub round the corner.


- Free and Open Source Licensing and RISC-V by Andrew Katz
Andrew Katz, a partner at Moorcrofts LLP, is one of the UK’s leading
free and open-source lawyers. He drafted the widely-used solderpad Open
Hardware Licence and is on the core legal team for drafting the CERN
Open Hardware licence. Andrew is a Fellow of the Free Software
Foundation Europe and the Open Forum Academy, and for 7 years held the
post of visiting lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London. He is a
visiting researcher at the University of Skövde, Sweden where he has
co-authored papers whose findings have been adopted into Swedish
government policy.

Andrew qualified as a barrister and was called to the bar (Inner Temple)
in 1991, and has now re-qualified as practises as a solicitor in England
and Wales. He is also an Irish solicitor (non-practising).

- MaxineVM on RISC-V by Florin-Gabriel Blanaru

In this talk we will talk about MaxineVM’s, a metacircular research VM,
in relationship to the RISC-V architecture.

A short overview of the current JVM ecosystem on the RISC-V architecture
will be presented first.

Next we will proceed with a high level view of MaxineVM along with a
description of the work that had to be accomplished for the RISC-V port.

A comparison of MaxineVM’s performance against OpenJDK Zero will follow
and we will conclude with a description of our current and future
research on safe code modification on architectures without SMC hardware
support.

Florin-Gabriel Blanaru is currently a research software engineer at the
University of Manchester.  During his bachelor’s degree at the
University of Manchester, he successfully ported MaxineVM to the RISC-V
architecture. He is interested in all the abstraction layers between the
hardware and the programming languages, including computer architecture,
operating systems and managed runtime systems. Florin is the inaugural
winner of the RISC-V Student of the Year award.

- Evaluating RISC-V using the Embench™ 0.5 Benchmark Suite by Jeremy Bennett

Dhrystone and Coremark have been the defacto standard microcontroller
benchmark suites for the last thirty years, but these benchmarks no
longer reflect the needs of modern embedded systems. Embench™ was
explicitly designed to meet the requirements of modern connected
embedded systems. The benchmarks are free, relevant, portable, and well
implemented.

In this talk we will present the results of benchmarking RISC-V for
various IoT class architectures using Embench. We shall look at what
this tells us about the impact of architecture, compilers and libraries
on how a system performs, both in terms of code size and code speed.
The aim is not to show which architecture, library or compiler is best,
but to gain insight allowing all architectures to be improved.

Dr Jeremy Bennett is Chief Executive of Embecosm, a company based in the
UK and Germany providing services developing open source compilers,
operating systems and chip models. He is Vice-Chair of the Embench Task
Group, and has been one of the main developers of the benchmark
infrastructure.  Jeremy is a Fellow of the BCS where he serves as Chair
of the Open Source Specialist Group.