Re: New Vax - future directions

[Anders Magnusson <ragge%tethuvudet.se@localhost>]

    Hi Ross,

Den 2021-11-20 kl. 01:38, skrev Ross Sponholtz:

Hi Folks,

I read the thread last July on Anders’ aka Ragge’s project of a FPGA implementation of a vax processor with great excitement!  I love the idea of being able to run NetBSD/VAX on a small power-efficient hardware – noise and power consumption make me leave my hardware VAXen off most of the time.

 

Things have gotten really quiet since though.  I’m curious about a few things:

 

Is this the place to discuss this?  If not, where is the right place?

    Well, I haven't setup any specific "place" to discuss it :-)

Is work still progressing on this?

    Slowly.  I have almost no time at all to spend on the vax as it is
    right now...

When done, is this going to be an “open-source” project?

    Well, why not? :-)
    
    This has been a "learning Verilog"-project for me, therefore parts
    of the code is in a terrible state :-)  
    Also note that only about 160 instructions are implemented, no
    packed decimal, floating point, ... yet.
    
    I have realized that I need to do two things before having a "1.0"
    version of it:
    
    1. Sketching up on paper how to get all parts to work together
    before doing some cleanup.
        I have a basic drawing where the cpu is implemented as an 8-step
    pipelined implementation with 6 parallel arg/fake arg evaluation
    steps, but the development board I had was so small so I couldn't
    implement it like this :-)  I also needed to gain some more
    knowledge about verilog.
    
    2. Document the XVAX extensions I plan to add. Even if the first
    implementation is only the legacy vax I want to make sure that I
    don't write something that will cause pain in the future.
    
    I hope this answers your questions.
    
    -- R