Re: Re: Re: f-cpu and Debian
hello,
De: Hamish Moffatt
>On Wed, Oct 09, 2002 at 05:48:18PM +0200, whygee@club-internet.fr wrote:
>> i meant, in the VHDL source code.
>> in fact, this code is pre-processed by m4/make
>> and register widths are computed and adjusted in the
>> whole F-CPU source tree (comprising currently C, bash
>> and VHDL code). Change one file in the m4 definition file,
>> type "make" and it builds a whole new complete CPU
>> with as wide registers as you want.
>
>What are you using as a development environment for your VHDL code (ie
>what simulator, synthesiser, synthesis target)?
Currently, we don't synthesize yet (except when someone
does this for informative purpose at work).
As explained in http://f-cpu.seul.org/new/VHDL-HOWTO.f-cpu
i use Simili, VanillaHDL, Riviera and NCsim.
These are either freeware (Simili, at least now),
abandonware (VanillaHDL) or commercial, expensive SW.
All other GPL or "open source" VHDL suite that were
tested did not comply with one or many requirements
(as explained in the link above).
To make things much more easy, i have written a small
"VHDL tool virtualisation script" that detects installed
tools and runs them with the correct parameters. If
another tool is to be supported, it's only a matter
of copy-pasting a template (a few bash lines) and mofying
it to suit the tool's invocation parameters.
>What tools could Debian provide in our OS to make it usable as a
>development platform?
* Maybe VanillaHDL could be provided as a "non-free" package
but it's provided in x86 binary form.
* attempts to compile and run FreeHDL and Savant were
unsuccessful. The supported syntax is not checked (Vanilla
is the minimum but maybe these GPL tools support even less
syntax). They also have some problems because the "standard
libraries" are not provided in optimised, pre-compiled form,
which makes compile & sim times VERY long. As a comparison,
NCSIM and RIVIERA are around 60x faster than simili, which has
most of the libs already optimised... It can be ok for small
tests, but running the whole CPU and executing reasonable code
is not possible this way...
* The author of Simili refuses to let anybody package his
software. He's trying to make a business so he needs full
control over his SW, but maybe, if several people ask kindly,
he could make .debs. However, his package is already pretty
easy to install, probably the easiest of all i have tried.
A simple script with 10 lines would do the trick.
hope this helps,
>Hamish
>--
>Hamish Moffatt VK3SB <hamish@debian.org> <hamish@cloud.net.au>
YG
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