On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 1:09 AM, Luís Vitório Cargnini <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello Julius, > > Please, which is the current state of the OR2K ? > > I would like to be more involved since I would like to use it to my research > in my workplace.
Hi Luis The current state of OR2k is that it's still vaporware. To be honest it would be great if we could get someone to kick start the process on this. I really think the OpenRISC project would be helped by developing a newer architecture with a more dense instruction set, and more suitable for deeply embedded use. It's a lot of work, though, and my time is very limited at the moment, so I've not been involved at all, however I'm excited by the prospect of the effort getting under way. However, if you're in a position to look at doing some work on it in any capacity, it'd be useful. Probably the initial steps are to figure out exactly what we're looking for. We'd need to think about what it is we're aiming for. Probably something which derives from OR1K would be nice, but not necessary? Probably it's something along the lines of what we have now, in that it's a configurable architecture which is capable of being stripped bare, in terms of features, to run small bare metal apps and RTOSes, and fully featured to run more complex operating systems such as those based on the Linux kernel. Things like the floating point and SIMD instructions are nice, but on FPGAs, of little use. Probably we should focus on a tight, neat control-based instruction set, to begin with anyway. I think it might be worth revisiting this topic on the mailing lists, so I'll CC them to see if anyone has any information or opinions. In my opinion, something which is a lot like OR1K at the moment (a lot of optional features such as caches, MMUs, parts of the instruction set) but with better code density, and a better system of doing conditional operations (branching, optional execution). Security is probably also a concern. Some people have mentioned things about virtualisation but I'm not too familiar with this, nor do I know if it's of any use in deeply-embedded applications, which is where I think OR2K could have its greatest potential. So I look forward to reviving this topic a little, and seeing what people come up with. As I say, I think if there's a proposal for an ISA which doesn't preclude people from being able to scratch their itch, add what they need and contribute it to the community (atomic operations are a good, recent example of this) then that'd be a good start. Cheers Julius > > Best Regards, > Luis Vitorio Cargnini _______________________________________________ OpenRISC mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openrisc.net/listinfo/openrisc
