FTTH!

Pine64 + USB drive

It looks like a crazy ball of string and rubber bands now. I added an external SSD in an enclosure powered by the compatible JMS578 chipset. But the board itself cannot supply enough power through USB to external drivers, so there’s also a powered USB hub (thus the whole thing needs two power supplies).

It works is the best I can say about it at this point.

Important edit: I discovered that the powered USB hub is not necessary (presumably because this is an SSD, not a spinning disk). That eliminates the power supply problem.

Pine64 — delivered

A few weeks ago you will remember that I ordered a Pine64 aarch64 developer kit with the wifi daughter-card, in order to test how well it works with upstream Fedora. It arrived today. The ordering process was very efficient with Pine64 keeping me up to date at all steps along the way, and there were no customs delays or charges.

As I’m rather busy in the next few days, I may not have time to look at it right away.

New dev server

It has 16 real Xeon cores and insane* amounts of RAM and cache:

It also has the Aspeed AST2400 BMC so it’s possible to manage it remotely using freeipmi and (for the video console) Java.

* Insane literally — This machine has the same amount of L3 cache (40 MB) as was the size of my first hard disk.

RISC-V on an FPGA, pt. 6

(Click for larger image)

The board on the left is the Digilent Nexys 4 DDR which I was using yesterday to boot Linux. It costs £261 (about $341) including tax and next day delivery. The board on the right is the cheaper Digilent Arty Board, which cost me $148 (two day delivery from the US) + £20 tax.

There are clear differences in the number of connectors, LEDs and buttons. The Nexys has VGA, ethernet, USB, 8 digit LED, many lights, a temperature sensor, and lots of buttons. The Arty has just the bare minimum as you’d expect given the price difference. Both boards use the same Xilinx Artix-7 family of FPGA, but they are not exactly the same. The expensive board on the left uses the XC7A100T which has 100K+ logic cells, the cheap board on the right uses the XC7A35T with 33K cells. What this means practically is that you are more limited in the size of designs which can be programmed on the smaller chip. Does this matter for RISC-V? Yes and no. The untether-v0.2 design I was using yesterday takes about 50K cells so it won’t fit on the smaller board. However SiFive apparently (I have not checked) have a reduced design that will fit. (Note that none of this affects the operating system or available RAM — those are separate issues. However a smaller design will have to cut a few corners, leave out parts of the chip that implement optimizations, etc and so will generally run slower).

Oddly the Arty Board (on the right) has more DDR3 RAM — 256MB vs 128MB. That is an improvement, since doing any real Linux work in 128MB of RAM is tough, but still not massive. The other significant difference is the Arty Board does not have a microSD-card socket. It has (just) 16MB of on-board flash instead. I’m not clear how you get Linux on there, but that’s what I’ll be exploring.

Finally it’s worth saying that both boards are incomplete, although in very minor ways. The Nexys 4 comes with an OTG USB cable, which is all you need to power the board, program it and use the serial port. However it omits a microSD-card which you will need to store Linux / other RISC-V software that you want to run. The Arty comes without any cables and thus requires that you supply an OTG USB cable. As mentioned above there seems to be no microSD-card option at all.

RISC-V on an FPGA, pt. 1

Last year I had open source instruction set RISC-V running Linux emulated in qemu. However to really get into the architecture, and restore my very rusty FPGA skills, wouldn’t it be fun to have RISC-V working in real hardware.

The world of RISC-V is pretty confusing for outsiders. There are a bunch of affiliated companies, researchers who are producing actual silicon (nothing you can buy of course), and the affiliated(?) lowRISC project which is trying to produce a fully open source chip. I’m starting with lowRISC since they have three iterations of a design that you can install on reasonably cheap FPGA development boards like the one above. (I’m going to try to install “Untether 0.2” which is the second iteration of their FPGA design.)

There are two FPGA development kits supported by lowRISC. They are the Xilinx Artix-7-based Nexys 4 DDR, pictured above, which I bought from Digi-Key for £261.54 (that price included tax and next day delivery from the US).

There is also the KC705, but that board is over £1,300.

The main differences are speed and available RAM. The Nexys has 128MB of RAM only, which is pretty tight to run Linux. The KC705 has 1GB of RAM.

I’m also going to look at the dev kits recommended by SiFive, which start at US$150 (also based on the Xilinx Artix-7).

DragonBoard

Libguestfs running on the LG G4

Previously …

The massive Bluetooth keyboard is a Logitech K480 and rather nice.

Nexus 9 ssh on the go

The Nexus 9 is an odd, compromised tablet, and way too expensive, but combined with the folio keyboard & pocketwifi it makes a nice ssh terminal for use on the road.

Various ssh apps like ConnectBot have terrible external keyboard support. So I compiled a static dropbear binary and static busybox, and I’m using those with Android Terminal Emulator.

The tablet has a 64 bit ARM processor (actually it’s way stranger than that – it uses a proprietary VLIW core with Transmeta-style code morphing in software). I used my AArch64 Fedora machine to compile the static binaries which I copied across.

I changed the default shell to busybox ash and added a bunch of start-up scripts to make Android more bearable.
It all works except nsswitch (user & DNS resolution) because of glibc static brokenness.

Two Freescale Freedom Boards (ARM Cortex M0)

The total cost including tax and delivery for two boards was £26, so at £13 each they are pretty reasonable. Of course you don’t get very much, just a few KB of flash and RAM. Enough to run a hand-written assembly program, small C programs, or a FORTH interpreter. The Cortex-M0 is a real 32 bit processor.