It has been a long time since my last blog post. My progress has been slow over the past 4 months but the important thing is that I’m back in Malaysia and have gotten back to work on the project at hand. Since my last post, a lot of aspects of the project has changed and I’ll be explaining this changes in this post and giving an overview on how the whole process will be from this point on. Program Read more
I always wondered how some Certificate Authorities (CA) got their certificates installed in browsers directly, without the user having to import it manually. It took a bit of extra google-fu. So, I thought it pertinent to note things down here. The key to doing it seems to be to use the appropriate mime type when downloading the certificate file. There are several that are supported by the Mozilla browser: application/x-x509-ca-cert application/x-x509-user-cert applicaiton/x-x509-email-cert As each name implies, it is used to Read more
Given that we are presently using an LTSP setup in our office, we could continue to use our old desktops as terminals while investing in better shared server hardware. While most of the desktop terminals were running fine, capable of full-HD playback, one machine was unable to do so. This machine was an older Compaq desktop model CQ2320D that came with an Atom 330 and a 100Mbps built-in LAN. Initial performance was terrible, with horrible frame-rates even for normal desktop Read more
Part of our project requires the use of regular expressions, which are now a part of the C++11 standard. However, getting things working was not completely straight-forward. All our development machines are running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and we are using CLANG as our default compiler. Every C++11 regular expression example compiles perfectly using: $ clang++ -std=c++11 regexp.cc However, running the program inadvertently results in it crashing each and every time with the following error. terminate called after throwing an instance Read more
The ultimate future goal is to create a generic Automated Test Bench that can be used with any of our IO cores. Of course the test vectors testing each core has to be different. However, since all our cores use wishbone bus this simplifies creating a generic solution. In this final post, I’ll list down the possible problems with creating a generic test bench and propose a solution for each one of them. 1. The cores I/O pins have different Read more
I’ve implemented a list of tests for each device to test it’s behavior within specifications. Those tests are specific for each device. The set of tests is repeated for each possible value of the tested device parameters and each run with new parameter values has it’s expected output saved in a separate file. This post will list down the tests conducted for each device GPIO Write to the control register to set the data direction Write to the data register Read more
This post is a documentation of the final version of automated test benches created to verify our IO cores. The test benches have been created for the our GPIO, Master SPI, Slave SPI, UART & I2C master and slave. The test benches verify only the behavior of those devices within their specs. It doesn’t have any random tests or tests for their behavior out of their specs. Here is an overall explanation of how the test benches work First, each Read more
In the past month I’ve been experimenting with various approaches to create Automated Test Benches to my Verilog IO cores that are using Wishbone bus. The Automated part simply means that the test bench will verify the correctness of the received outputs and display a Pass or Fail message. This is opposing to the normal test benches where a waveform or textual dump of signals is generated and the user has to verify the correctness of the outputs himself. In Read more
We are considering deploying Witty applications on OpenShift. In theory, it should be possible to do it but it’s still necessary to test things out. There are some unanswered questions on how such a deployment might work. This blog entry was very useful in getting things deployed on a DIY cartridge. However, there are some minor issues that needed to be tweaked. Starting The start action hook that I used was: nohup $OPENSHIFT_REPO_DIR/diy/hello.wt –http-port=$OPENSHIFT_DIY_PORT –http-address=$OPENSHIFT_DIY_IP –docroot=$OPENSHIFT_REPO_DIR/www |& /usr/bin/logshifter -tag hello.wrt Read more
Verilator does a great job notifying you about any possible source of error in your Verilog code. However, it’s not really the best sight getting a screen full of assorted warnings and errors whenever you compile a code with Verilator that was just working perfectly on Icarus. I don’t like warnings so I shot them down one by one until Verilator had absolutely nothing to say. This blog explains a couple of tough warnings that I had to figure out on my Read more