Just to do a quick and dirty comparison of several popular ISAs, I compiled a simple C application that calculates primes using the Sieve of Eratosthenes using the following command: gcc -O2 -c -o prime.o prime.c Then, I compared the output binaries just on memory size using the ELF size command. I used the ARM and THUMB outputs as a benchmark for comparison. $ size prime.arm text data bss dec hex filename 244 0 0 244 f4 prime.arm $ size Read more
While work has been under way on our new processor core, which shall remain multi-threaded using interleaved multi-threading in hardware, we have been searching for a free ISA to use as the base instruction set. Our previous microprocessor was based on the Microblaze instruction set (ISA). While there is nothing inherently wrong with this architecture, it seems to have lost some allure and stagnated for a while. So, I was recently reminded of RISC-V, an ISA that was released last year Read more
I continued working on the the Inkscape extensions that I started last week. I worked on improving and modifying some of the functions of the extensions to make the process of creating components graphics easier. But before that, we had to design and establish a naming convention for naming the components and their pins. Previously for our tests we created simple components manually, and thus we chose temporally names. However, now we are automatically generating an entire library, thus we Read more
In this week I had to continue working in creating the Verilog top level module, to recap , for the past few weeks I have finished the instantiation of all the modules (processor, switch and some I/O devices ) needed in the top level module and started the connection and wiring between them. If you are following my blog entries you will notice that I have encountered some issues with the switch module as we had two routes to take, Read more
Last week I spent most of my time studying the application and try to solve the application problem. Let us first go into the problems that I have discover in the application first. revoking the certificate twice This event is highly unlikely to occur, but there is a thin chance of it happening. Previously I used the email address of the user to store their certificate in the approot. In the revoke directory of approot, I have also used the Read more
This week I focused my study on the various file system to find out the limit of number of certificate that this application can hold. So I first started to search the Internet for the NTFS(New Technology File System) which is developed by Microsft. The quality that I am interested to study from this system is the maximum memory that a file can hold, and the maximum number of sub folder that a folder can have. Then I went to Read more
My task currently is to generate the graphics library for the components that we are going to use in our schematic editor. To be more precise, it is not my objective to create all the graphics for more than a thousand components, but rather find a way to automate and simplify this process as mush as possible and thus, it will not necessary be me who is going to generate that actual graphics. The method we started experimenting with is Read more
In this week I had to continue working in creating Verilog top level module . As I mentioned in my last blog entry, the top level module should contain modules such as: processor, switch and several IOs devices. The instantiation of these modules was completed successfully in last weeks. In this week my work was mainly dedicated to the switch module. The switch is a module that is used -as widely known- to select one IO device to be connected Read more
In the past week I managed to instantiate the modules based on the user declared objects. Each C++ declared object is corresponding to an instance module in verilog (you can refer to my previous blog entry for more information ). My task for this week was to connect and wire these instance modules together using the WISHBONE bus interface. The first question came to my mind was “What is the wishbone interface”?. Wishbone is a flexible design methodology used for Read more
I did not get into OAuth like what I was planning to do last week. Instead I was tweaking the application and the back end of the whole application. I started with the GUI application of the revoke page. Previously, I tried to do some Auto complete function on the search tab to speed up the process of finding a certificate. But the method that I choose to implement this function is wrong. What I did was to first get Read more