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NLNet Funding Proposals for the Libre RISC-V SoC: call for participation
by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 23 Sep '19

23 Sep '19

[please do remove all but libre-riscv-dev when replying, thx] https://libre-riscv.org/nlnet_proposals/ A series of funding proposals, each for EUR 50,000, have been submitted to NLNet. These are for charitable donations and may be given to either individuals or to Universities (not to Corporations) for completion of an allotted milestone. The basic idea is to think through and plan for commercial completion all of the tasks that will make the Libre RISC-V SoC a success. It's a lot! We have the following: - a second Vulkan 3D driver, which will be a port of AMDVLK. similar to swiftshader, for the Libre RISCV SoC, except taking into account the Vectorisation, predication and custom accelerated opcodes. - a video acceleration initiative: with NEON assembler being up to the job of decoding 720p video on recent ARM64 processors, the idea is to design instructions that will do the job and then follow through getting the code upstream. - two related proposals which, in combination, will result in an actual 180nm ASIC being taped out at TSMC. - a formal mathematical proof of the hardware design, proving inviolate guarantees of its correctness. this because although auditing the code is possible, it is both laborious, error prone, and could be compromised. mathematical proofs may be run by anyone and are inviolate. - an augmentation of gcc to support the processor’s parallel and vectorisation capabilities. Yes, really: 180nm ASICs only cost around EUR 600 per square millimetre, and with around 20 or so mm^2 it is completely within the realm of possibility for an NLNet Grant to fund a test ASIC. With each square millimetre being around 40,000 gates in 180nm, that's around 800,000 gates, which is enormous. We would then have a proven ASIC, and moving up to 40nm or below, which would require around the USD 2m mark, is a far less risky proposition. The irony is that whilst these funding proposals are quite easy to write, we also need to find people willing to do the work! In particular, we need at least one EU Citizen per project. They do not have to be permanently resident in the EU, they do however need an EU residence. Yes this includes the UK at the time of writing. This is an extremely important strategic project that puts you - software libre developers - in the driving seat of modern technology instead of picking up the reverse engineering crumbs that fall from the Corporate table with at least a 2 year delay. If you would like to help and actually receive donations (directly transferred) from NLNet for doing so, please do contact me directly or on libre-riscv-dev. L. -- --- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68

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STM32MP1
by Paul Boddie 22 Sep '19

22 Sep '19

Hello, I saw that Olimex were getting excited about a ST Microelectronics SoC that, at least in some forms, might be an interesting EOMA-related candidate, too: https://olimex.wordpress.com/2019/09/03/stm32mp1-nice-candidate-for-new-ind… https://olimex.wordpress.com/2019/09/19/stm32mp1-olinuxino-development-upda… Here's the actual product site (with the now "normal" nagging about cookies, all enabled by default, and even spurious whining about my browser being "out of date"): https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32mp1-series.html As noted by Olimex, there's a variant (STM32MP157) with a "3D GPU". According to the datasheet, this is a Vivante solution. Some people might be worried about the main CPU specification, though: 650MHz dual-core Cortex-A7. There's this interesting all-in-one module available, too: https://octavosystems.com/octavo_products/osd32mp15x/ Olimex were a bit "sniffy" about this, mentioning the 512MB RAM of the available modules, but it looks like future ones will have 1GB RAM. Anyway, I hope this is interesting to someone out there. Paul

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How are things?
by zap 12 Sep '19

12 Sep '19

I saw your 70th update. It's good to know at least that you can roll some out finally. Right? Do you know when Risc-V processors made for laptops will be out. If so, when one is produced you could possibly reverse engineer one for the eoma68 (standard) libre laptop

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PINE64 foundation beat us both to making a laptop
by David Niklas 06 Sep '19

06 Sep '19

No intent to discourage, but rather to encourage, as it's opensource AFAIK and have researched. https://www.pine64.org/2019/07/05/july-update-all-about-the-pinebook-pro/ Powered by an RK3399. I think the ROCK64 board: https://www.pine64.org/devices/single-board-computers/rock64/ I'm unsure how much RAM the laptop has as the article is very sparse on details. I did try and search for the information. Likewise for the information on camera, screen, and anything other then the USB-C connector which appears to be brought out along with some form of EMMC flash and it has a 10,000mAh battery. It's rather chintzy looking, though. And that is why I'm making my own. That's the power of OSS/FLOSS! Sincerely, David

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Re: [Arm-netbook] PINE64 foundation beat us both to making a laptop
by aexlfowley＠web.de 25 Aug '19

25 Aug '19

On Fri Aug 2 06:37:03 BST 2019, EfraimVagner <EfraimVagner at protonmail.com> wrote: >As for the hardware, it has no open schematics at all, as far as I know. https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Pinebook_Main_Page#Pinebook_Schematics_an… https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/1080P_Pinebook_Main_Page#Pinebook_Schemat…

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Arduino, ARM microcontrollers, and analog
by David Niklas 24 Aug '19

24 Aug '19

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 Hello list, Recently I and luke exchanged a set of emails on the above topic and luke suggested to bring the discussion on list. I originally sent it off list to avoid adding more off topic discussion, but luke advised that: "It's very diverse, and concerns the *development* of laptops - and hardware." So, here's the refresher (I'm not going to quote all of it because it's not worth it to you or anyone). There's still room for much discussion on the subject. luke, if my attempted condensed form does not capture your intentions perfectly be sure to send my terminal SIG666 and scream loudly. ;-) > As a direct result of Trump's tariffs I find myself needing to buy > myself a few uCs now instead of later [1]. > The problem is, though I do know a lot about electricity I know > relatively little about integrated circuits. I've got a long road ahead > filled with lots of reading to get there. > > If you have any other suggestions, I'm also listening. Luke pointed out that "pricing on things like STM32Fs is so low, it's not worth worrying about." I answered, "Call me pathetic, but 25% is still 25% no matter the starting cost. There's also the concern that if the uC demand reduces then the price will rise as the companies strive to make up for lost profits and then demand will further drop... and development will stall..." Luke recommended the STM32F lineup supported by lubopencm3, which I already had my eyes on, and said that the AVR lineup was yucky. Since then I discovered that there is a third choice of uCs. They use the LX6 32bit microprocessor at 160-240MHz, which is pretty fast. Here's wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP32 Lots of links to docs here: http://esp32.net/ Git hub has lots of code: https://github.com/espressif Official docs: https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/latest/ What's strange about them is that they have not released the ISA docs yet for the LX6 core in spite of GCC 5.2 supporting it. GCC 7 and 8 support is experimental. https://github.com/espressif/crosstool-NG/pull/2 https://esp32.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=6477 https://www.esp32.com/viewtopic.php?t=293 I did double check that this is still the case: https://esp32.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=11908 My intentions in purchasing are two fold: I'll probably be using a uC for a keyboard on my own laptop, and I had hoped to build an Opensource oscilloscope/logic analyzer several years from now. This is not to mention the usefulness which uCs can be in general. Luke pointed out, "that's a different matter: that's pretty hard-core ADC territory. 100mhz and above, with 16-bit accuracy and above: realistically, only Analog Devices covers that ground, and a standard low-cost uC would not in any way be able to cope with the amount of data generated." That exact use case has a large following (179 articles on hackaday alone): https://hackaday.com/tag/oscilloscope/ And here's a really cool project using SDRAM: https://hackaday.com/2016/07/19/hackaday-prize-entry-the-cheapest-logic-ana… Here are some "professional" ones. ATXMEGA32A4U uC powered: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/920064946/xminilab-portable-oscillosco… https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/920064946/xprotolab-portable Here are some not using uCs: Xilinx spartan3A FPGA: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/751733865/smartscope-reinventing-the-o… Luke kindly pointed out that this is FPGA powered: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/201461162/unoprologic2-ultra-low-cost-… MIPS arch (has higher clocks then your typical uC): https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oscope/mutliplatform-multi-os-oscillos… Lastly and I've no idea what powers this one, even after reading the datasheet's summery: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/342199468/openscope-instrumentation-fo… If you've got anything to add, as always, thank you, David > [1]: I get it, tariffs work for steel, but not so well for computers, as > bunnie explains it's a much much more dangerous game: > https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/12/business/us-steel-mill/ > https://www.nasdaq.com/article/nucor-to-build-135-billion-steel-plate-mill-… > https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5349 > I read that they would affect SBCs on linuxgizmos and guessed they'd > affect uCs before too long also: > http://linuxgizmos.com/introduction-to-catalog-of-125-linux-hacker-boards/ > What's really strange is that he's targeting the maker community vs. > only the big companies like ASUS, i.e. he's not set a small quantity > limit on the tariffs (though big companies would probably try to > maneuver into such an exception). -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iQIzBAEBCAAdFiEEL2N7+xWmVOJDQxWGm3XCrhg2YP8FAl1hr+gACgkQm3XCrhg2 YP+HnQ/9HGJyyzrS+VBsbd/AE4vLkB0ZghN5n7hCBPDpZkc8eTRV0TTE51XOHygO G1RqhPGu23mQqBuTH1LupEAAsHK6kKUGbZoDl0TgMSXq2vx4T0rzx1bbPRWFeXIz ny2m+SRqx0twYOUc3EE2fauL/StJ3hfm3wkmbBjribaFrdgS/b0XQVhZ0tzuN9Lh WG+UUZSrAcyrQAbCHiE23Kcka3r9WG0PHR/mtqFkLis3kjDZxiXTxauuGySmAE5G LMFMihUIvmTYf4rMseBkIZgCvMDdkPo9ZMA0vU0ROJkObmqBzCvsSeqQGn2SQRRr 1XjxHMegHOXdXkNjdQv95obkN69wVw65AIRhBL++gYFn3Tn/DAYs7cwlhSgb8Jw+ +QcE8f9xXGa/aMmwq4+u4CKoLmOfvI+Ph/YszUIyOXYXyY1+I52SaMfWQsWiy0/e BCFk9rZnCOAaVQHRP2PciivZLM9EIm4a4saP7vrh/G57QvdPKEnduNsV9TTJom99 Hbn19qhXwlRD3iKilOWzo2yuGXJ2pnQ0WWli0QGrMrcGJdZWu13YjHhTAU2vF6LW RyfWQKKiaK34WqJ0iOWPo0tvAI6N6jzB8oP5+1PbapxBrZSc9lQjM3lfMy16/nyI LhPoWY2dR4K7oXCbitoux108LT052ZUwrUyzjS1DrcOLR69HKNM= =zxaR -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Fixing the fex file once and for all
by David Niklas 22 Jul '19

22 Jul '19

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 Dear luke, Although I can't find the post, I do remember you writing about the fex file and how hard it is to modify it. I've encountered some similar problems when programming and I've always thought of doing things like Donald Ervin Knuth recommended. That would be, I would use literate programming. I've not read the official paper through because I did not know it was available (and I did not buy the book which I did know about). As it is, when I went looking for you for some information on the subject I found more then I had expected for you. A paper: http://www.literateprogramming.com/knuthweb.pdf Website: http://www.literateprogramming.com/ Criticism: http://akkartik.name/post/literate-programming The criticism shows how this method can be taken to an extreme and be a complete waste of everyones time. Hope it helps, David -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iQIzBAEBCAAdFiEEL2N7+xWmVOJDQxWGm3XCrhg2YP8FAl0v5yIACgkQm3XCrhg2 YP8cLBAA6ujfFmCm6sFq73l5WLf3L1GTABduglRrkUj5LwhnyTFhII/fiTy+mNLS d6CkKSuJp3iu/wizYy4Pyb/EIt6n8D4dG6Vq7nGTQWIABS/4KW6n5c2iIFmQajXK /LkRkCdFvMJHF9Ok1XutvCNTFQm5EBh1RdZQ2buERLkOJpjcfGWRo4SztouQzhpW AK0ekRRxqolQOuS1hKeRG+rUb6hnGj+aMQcpYVcMFIKmzNGsOAVsA2Hkxyc5m6ZB Yn1sU7IQ/zia9nirfoeOZWA70/iSpWUn13UeU7m84Mw3NPoJ8utsL5zqJ1PtiITG 8PXOH1FIQZhdqpqvOb+h79KdGs1U4EAHEMIYHoSGXdsK74foyBcN+maKK0E0gMGS Cb5f7RtC2t8tNZ+0pthcwOlOUYqtoiWyIOeWCX1lReknzVcdO4rgOUu45WK2amCC RCb+O5w6Tvptq6RFH0BJypI1SbgVRi5n8S3dKSPlXFfVecsdPU91vUERpqlFpGRH qWFNfNsLH9MgKg3LNceN+Rm2SRqnwKpxQFoFv/eeeBiH6EpOXrJgPKWzsV8CUtBo 8iFqMMvXccNWyHnyXiUB5lT+ysBMV6UdD+7njRLc+aPWG4ngkbqkZ0Wevdh3qC8g QaWpdjMDCfZ8uou+yVk6b1vh92lT/9H0S58QE49JHkok83VpxyU= =9fnZ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Ubuntu as a moral ideology applied to "Guilds"
by J.L. 17 Jul '19

17 Jul '19

In the vaguest-broadest historical sense, guild means a loose hierarchal collective identifing with one category of labour (the craft), who make potentially predictable aspects of the craft less unpredictable through exposition and memorization. Trust pre-requires any "cathedral" such as a "guild" to not abusively attempt to solipsistically shape reality by shaping the perception of reality, such as by investing in predictions disporportionately with certainty in those predictions merely as an expression of desire for those prediction's to be true. Ubuntu roughly translates to "a state caused by social justice called personhood" represents a practice of protecting the differences of others as well as yourself through intentionally detached means, essentially giving attention to whether others are who they want to be and seeking to keep them who they want to be even while fighting them. At scale, that equates to maximizing agency (or choices on who or what to be agent of). Ubuntu fits in the semantics where I placed the keyword 'abusively' or where one might believe in 'solipsism'. A "cathedral" such as a "guild" indubitably makes bets which shape reality solely by shaping the perception of reality, whether one literally believes in solipsism or figuratively believes people build according to what any "cathedral" facilitates their visualization of. Thus, one might claim ubuntu obligates a "cathedral" such as a "guild" to describe reality in a way maximally motivating to the most extremely detached interests. The following video (licensed creative commons) at one point uses agile as an example, while describing in detail (without explicitly mentioning the word) how give ubuntu to others from the most socially abstract (a leadership) position in the terran civilization (earth): (if the author had heard about ubuntu, they would probably agree with ubuntu) https://invidio.us/watch?v=VaWNQjFtGD0 Note some grammatical nuances: 1 i say socially abstract rather than leadership, to support the notion of invisible unstructured entirely anonymous influence over a "standalone complex"; socially abstract describes the state of mind and epistemological faculties rather than any particular identity, such as how the (what I'd call) 'temporal identity' of 'the laughing man' is controlled by ideas rather than a person. 2 i say terran civilization to include all intelligent or potentially intelligent species on any terra-class planet, rather than any more limited more common category 3 ubuntu traditionally recognizes animal species as having the potential to achieve more ubuntu than humans on occasion, therefore calling the state humanity contradicts the nature of ubuntu in a fundamental way for no relationship has more potential for detachment than beings physically (not merely cognitively) in capable of communicating the same language. The following video attempts to describe ubuntu explicitly. The author very prolifically documents popular ideologies commonly referred to as "philosophy" particularly "greek philosophy", which should give them some accreditation to judge the merits of ubuntu. The author currently lives in west africa, which should accredit their ability to accurately research african philosophy. https://invidio.us/watch?v=E_naFb_kdCQ I would definitely like to get in contact with the author to ask them about licensing all their awesome contributions the internet's commonwealth of information, as creative commons. To any one interested, I still have interest in updating the rhombus-tech wiki including the tables summarizing the scale and freeness of known major open source projects. I still have interest in PocketCHIP's hardware (though the backing company failed/collapsed), though I believe heavily in urbit's OS architecture so I want to focus my effort in studying urbit with the intention to perhaps one day have hardware such as EOMA (novice) or PocketCHIP (hacker) form a bottom-up libre computer boot to an urbit userland with as minimal middleware as possible. I need to learn/develop-in-mind the standards (or, one might say, the most ubuntu way) first, then make progress in that direction. In short, I want as certain about where I want to go as possible, prior to taking steps in any direction. Please don't discount me for my absence : P Side-note: I've joined the U.S. Navy (not a fan of the U.S. military, yet hope to make a difference) -- CC0

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co can see IP without paying through the roof, how nice of ARM.
by David Niklas 17 Jul '19

17 Jul '19

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Fwd: Funding ideas
by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 15 Jul '19

15 Jul '19

---------- Forwarded message --------- Date: Sat, Jul 13, 2019 at 4:51 PM Subject: Funding ideas To: Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl(a)lkcl.net> Hey. Sad to say I had little progress on my "Why EOMA for crypto" article/promo campaign but at least I have some ideas to share. 1. Education What is a good susbtance for education? Something open and available. You can't teach and study the making of computers on closed Intel hardware and software. You can use open platforms like OLPC or Minix but most of them have a drawback - they are either purely academic/educational, or unpopular/unsuccessful in the wild. With EOMA and Libre RISC you (as an educational institution) can have both: something that is open down to the bone and can be a great learning substance for studens, _and_ something that is a real commercial product in the wild. The idea is to grow partnerships with schools/unis/academia (and possibly win some grants). For EOMA there are potential strategic benefits - it will be very hard to kill something that generation(s) have studied in schools/unis. If your random geek neighbor can fix or upgrade your device I'd call it a win. 2. OSS funding platforms Recently I ran across some OSS funding movements emerging in the crypto space. One is called Gitcoin. It is a general bounty platform for funding open source. Recently they had quite a lot of overlap with Ethereum https://gitcoin.co/blog/radical-results-gitcoins-25k-match/ Another one is GitHub - they recently integrated a sponsorship system that allows to fund individual developers. Repository admins can now increase visibility of funding options for their open source projects via the FUNDING.yml file, which currently supports GitHub Sponsorship, Patreon, Open Collective, Ko-Fi, Tidelift, Community Bridge, as well as custom URLs. https://help.github.com/en/categories/supporting-the-open-source-community-… https://help.github.com/en/articles/displaying-a-sponsor-button-in-your-rep… I'm sure there are other such platforms. The common thing is they all look how to match donors with workers. 3. Grants from specific crypto treasuries Zcash Foundation grants is just one example. This is obviously not general and is Zcash specific. Since the focus is Zcash, I guess they might need clear understanding what will Zcash gain - in our case this is a non backdoored, fully auditable, cheap device that allows one to run a light crypto wallet and that you can easily carry around. Example funded initiative: https://zengo.com/zcash-foundation-funds-research-project-by-kzen/ The above idea applies to any cryptocommunity that might be interested in cheap and trusted computing device. It also applies to Decred - we now have a platform where anybody can pitch an idea to stakeholders, run a vote and possibly get funded. Like 10 or 20 initiatives have already been funded. They were all specific to Decred, but I hope that the understanding of importance of hardware will grow and stakeholders would approve some joint funding for decent projects like EOMA. 4. Meta: reuse existing research The problem is not new. This guide has collected various approaches and case studies: https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand Feel free to share this to anyone who might advance these ideas.

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