Hi again ! As the goal for ash1 is to make it as small and as fast as possible. I’ve tried to investigate the size and speed features of ash1. As we have seen from the previous post, ash1 is pretty small (~500 FPGA slices)… I guess this is super cool if we compare it with a typical MAC Ethernet IP core (~2800 FPGA slices). Moreover, it’s smaller than AEMB processor core (~1500 slices). So in terms of size, the Read more
It has been a while since my last blog … I was busy with my exams and university issues for about a month. So, here we come again to talk about ash1. Since I have started working on ash1, I was anxiously waiting for the day where I can write a piece of code and test it out on an FPGA device and this is what happened ! On 20th of August, 2011, ash1 executed its first program that I Read more
I was being informed that my blog posts were too technical until a point that it bored the readers. I felt pity for my supervisor, because he needs to read through all my dull blog posts before publishing them. The reason that I prefer to blog technical stuff is that it is has less restriction in terms of grammar, and also fewer vocabulary is needed. All in all, engineers are trained to write technical stuff, right? Since I’m now having Read more
Processes can be classified as either I/O-bound or processor-bound. As the name suggests, the former is a process where much of the time is spent in waiting for relatively slow I/O operations to complete. For instance, a process taking input for a word processor will be I/O-bound as it spends most of its time waiting for characters input. Such a process is runnable for only short duration, because it is eventually blocked to wait for more I/O. On the other hand, processor-bound process spends most of the Read more
Continue from my previous post, LLVM: Compiling FreeRTOS with LLVM (Part 1). Anybody who might have some basic skills in programming, creating Makefiles especially, must be laughing hysterically if they come across and read my previous post in this topic. When I google the phrase “Compiling freertos with llvm” or “freertos llvm”, my post comes out first in the results. I wonder how many read that post. Silly me, pity them. I was laughing at myself and feel embarrassed when Read more
Guess what? It’s powered by AESTE technology. Yeay! Shareable recently covered a group of residents of Jalalabad, Afghanistan who built their own open-source wireless network from junk and everyday household items. For the less-industrious yet DIY-inclined, the Village Base Station (pdf) is a low-power, easy to deploy tool developed by Berkeley professor Kurtis Heimerl to create a GSM cellular data network in areas with limited power and network resources. MobileActive recently got their hands on a prototype and tested it Read more
Multitasking operating system is a software that offers interleave execution of more than one process. It is capable of executing several processes concurrently and therefore giving an illusion of parallelism in the view of user abstraction. Multitasking operating systems come in two flavors: cooperative multitasking and preemptive multitasking. In cooperative multitasking, a process does not stop running until it is voluntary to do so. As the result, process in a cooperative multitasking system can dominates processor time. Conversely, in preemptive multitasking, a running process is suspended involuntarily so that next process can be Read more
It is about two more weeks before my internship at Aeste ends. Yesterday, I finished my task of cleaning up LLVM floating points instructions and cache instructions. What I did was just hunt all these unwanted instructions inside AEMB target directory files and remove it without damaging the files or disrupt any dependencies. That was it, but I am not sure its going to be working or not. Now, come the second part, testing the code by compiling FreeRTOS with Read more
My recent task is to clean up the instructions from LLVM code. One must wonder why do I need to clean up the instructions, well perhaps the definition of my recent task was not adequately explain here. AEMB is considered as binary compatible to the Xilink Microblaze (Wikipedia link), however it is not a ‘drop in’ replacement. For a quite distinctive example, AEMB does not support floating point instructions. Yet. Fortunately, due to the compatibility of their instruction-set, I was Read more
Just read another interesting piece on why it is becoming increasingly more beneficial for people to join startups instead of large corporations. Quoting the main bits of the article: The Steady Income Myth In an adequately funded startup company one is guaranteed to have an interesting two year run, constantly learning more and something very valuable to walk away with afterwards regardless of what happens. The Influence In a startup you get to directly influence the product you are building. Read more