Re: A RISC-V themed evening at the BCS

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

Just a heads up that this is next Thursday.

Apologies for the top post :)

On 06/11/2017 15:40, Sevan Janiyan wrote:
> Hello,
> This months OSSG / OSHUG meetup at the BCS is on the theme of RISC-V.
> The event is free but you need to register, the details are below.
> 
> Hopefully see you there.
> 
> 
> Sevan
> 
> 
> Event #62 - RISC-V, RISC-V, RISC-V
> 
> On the 23rd November 2017, 18:30 to 21:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The
> Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA.
> 
> This months meeting will be on the theme of RISC-V, an open Instruction
> Set Architecture (ISA) which started life at the University of
> California, Berkeley.
> 
> Registration link: https://ossg231117.eventbrite.co.uk
> Closing date for bookings is Tuesday 21st November 2017 at 11:30 pm. No
> more bookings will be taken after this date.
> 
> 
> Bringing up cycle-accurate models of RISC-V cores
> - -----------------------------------------------
> 
> The openness of the RISC-V ISA has enabled the development of many
> open-source RISC-V cores with varying capabilities. Choosing an
> implementation that meets given requirements can be done to some
> extent by comparing specifications and other attributes of the cores,
> but any decision must be based on actual testing. Using Verilator to
> generate cycle-accurate models enables rapid development of testing
> platforms.
> 
> This talk provides a report of our experience bringing up
> cycle-accurate models of two cores in particular, RI5CY from the PuLP
> project, and Clifford Wolf's PicoRV32. For testing, a software
> ecosystem consisting of a compiler, binary utilities, debugger, and an
> interface between the model and debugger accompanies the Verilator
> model.
> 
> To compare the cores, we used the GCC test suite and the RISC-V ISA
> test suite for measuring correctness, and the Bristol/Embecosm
> Embedded Benchmark Suite (BEEBS) to compare performance. All code and
> scripts used for the implementation are open-source, and can be
> re-used by others who wish to do similar exercises with other RISC-V
> cores.
> 
> 
> * Edward Jones has a background in parsing techniques and works at
> Embecosm on LLVM and GNU toolchains. He is also involved in research
> by Embecosm to investigate ways in which the software tool chain can
> reduce program energy consumption. Edward Jones is a Computer Science
> graduate of the University of Kent.
> 
> 
> 
> FreeBSD/RISC-V and Device Drivers
> - -------------------------------
> 
> The FreeBSD port to RISC-V 64-bit ISA was added in January 2016. FreeBSD
> is the first operating system that officially supported RISC-V in the
> main repository.
> Since its introduction, support has evolved, RISC-V privileged
> architecture has updated a few times. The platform is maturing making it
> suitable for general, commercial, research and educational
>  use. The GCC v7.0 target for RISC-V was officialy upstreamed and NVIDIA
> is planning to ship all of their GPUs with RISC-V coprocessor enabled in
> the future. Several companies have announced the
>  start of RISC-V chip development and many universities are taking
> RISC-V as a target architecture for doing research. The world first
> RISC-V microcontroller-class board HiFive1 was released and
>  we are getting closer to the first general purpose board to become
> available! This talk will describe the current status of FreeBSD/RISC-V,
> toolchain and supported simulators. The porting process as well as
> describing the latest changes made to FreeBSD in order to
> support the latest RISC-V privilege specification (v1.10). This includes
> enabling by default <acronym title="Flattened Dev
> ice Tree">FDT</acronym> support and drivers attachment change, SBI
> interface, compiler flags/built-in definition changes, support for
> updated BBL boot loader, RISC-V privilege levels, initial pa
> ge tables build, page table entry flags and other changes. An overview
> of FreeBSD device drivers subsystem will also be covered describing the
> device frameworks, buses and kernel-interfaces that
>  exists in FreeBSD (e.g. Newbus, cdevsw, bus_dma, SYSINIT, vt, sound,
> ifnet, spibus, etc), how to use and configure them and how to debug a
> device driver. This should answer the question: How to
>  write device driver for FreeBSD/RISC-V?
> 
> * Ruslan Bukin is a Research Associate at University of Cambridge
> Computer Laboratory. He has been a FreeBSD user since 2002 and src
> committer since 2013. His main interests and contributions to FreeBSD
> are related to computer architectures support, performance monitoring
> technologies support, hardware tracing technologies (Intel PT), device
> drivers, DMA engines and DMA frameworks, hardware security (Intel SGX,
> CHERI), heterogeneous computing. Ruslan is the lead developer of the
> FreeBSD/RISC-V project. He obtained a Computer Science degree in 2008
> from Peoples' Friendship University of Russia in Moscow
> 
> 
> Talk #3
> - -----
> TBA
> 
> Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt.
> For overseas delegates who wish to attend the event please note that BCS
> does not issue invitation letters.
>