This subtitle is not finished yet. If you are able to, please support us and watch the talk in amara for the last changes: https://c3subtitles.de/talk/1341 Thanks!
*36c3 intro music* [Filler, please remove ina mara]
Herald: Welcome everybody to our next talk: Linux on open source hardware with
open source chip design. Who here in the audience uses Linux? please short sign of
hands, feels like almost 100 percent, I would say. OK. A hundred percent of people
use Linux. So who have you use it on open hardware? We are pleased. Another show of
hands. Yeah, that's not too many. Who have you would like to use it on open hardware?
And I guess that's why you're here. So I'm glad that we have Drew Fustini here. Our
new speaker. He's a open source hardware designer and embedded Linux developer and
also the vice president of the Open Source Software Association. And who better to
tell you how to run your Linux on open source hardware? Please welcome Drew with
a big, warm round of applause and have fun with this talk. Thank you very much.
*applause* Thank you.
*Applause*
Drew: I'll skip past my introduction. It's Congress, so probably most people are
familiar with open source. So before I jump into what open source hardware is,
just want to frame it in the context. If people aren't familiar with open source
is. So, examples that are Linux apparently always running Linux in this room, which
is great. Underneath Android, there's Linux as well. LibreOffice which I use to
make this presentation is also open source. Firefox the web browsers open
source. So we're probably all very familiar with open source software and
open source refers to something that you can modify and share because the design is
publicly accessible. So with software we're talking about that you can inspect
and modify and enhance the source code. So in the terms of, When we talk about open
source, there's a couple different terms that people use. They might use free or
Libre or open source and those do have different philosophical backgrounds. For
the purposes of this talk, I'm going to conflate those terms and I'm just going to
refer to it as open source hardware. Though some people use the terms free
hardware, libre hardware, open hardware. But I'm just going to using the term open
source hardware for this talk. So open source hardware is hardware whose design
is made publicly available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make and
sell that the design or hardware based on the design. So this is a definition that
we came up with about 10 years ago at an event called the Open Hardware Summit.
People that were making hardware projects, we got together and tried to come up with
a definition of what we wanted it to mean. So I mostly do electronics, though. Open
hardware and open source hardware is more than just that. It can be mechanical
design, basically any physical object where you have design files that you could
share. But just to give you an example in the context of electronics what where
we're talking about is this schematic, the board layout and then the building
materials, the parts list. And we're not just talking about an output file like a
PDF or our graphic file of the schematic or Gerber is for the board layout. We're
talking about editable source file from the from the CAD software. So something
like Eagle or a KiCAD. And then one of the things that's good to do with the bill
materials is if you want to enable other people deal to build your project, it's
good to make sure that the components are available in low quantity. This isn't a
strict requirement of the definition of open source hardware, but if you want
people to build a build your project and it's important to make sure that they can
build it in in low quantities. So many people have heard of Arduino. OK, good.
Good number of people in the room. So Arduino was a microcontroller board that
was created at small school in Italy like over 10 years ago. And it became super
popular because they, it was good enough at the time to do a lot of different
interactive electronics projects and they shared the hardware design and the code on
the Internet. And it just kind of achieved critical mass. A lot of people took it and
modified it for different projects, different use cases. At the beginning, I
had a link there to the slides. Also, if you pull up the talk page, there's a link
to the slides as well. I have a lot of links in these slides. Something that is
interesting as there was a documentary back when Arduino was starting about the
team. Just went to check out to see what see what things were like when that was
starting. So one of the most popular Arduino boards is the UNO, which you see a
picture of there. So how do we know that the UNO is open source hardware? Well, if
we go to the Arduino Web site, we can see that the design files from Eagle, which is
the CAD software they use, is there and we can download that zip file and it has the
schematic and the board layout. Now, when we're releasing our design files for a
hardware project, we need to choose a license. And there is a lot of different
options when it comes to licenses. One is the Creative Commons suite of licenses. So
one common one, you might see people use that CC-BY means attribution and then
share like essay say. One thing to note is if you had the noncommercial attribute,
then that makes it not open source. In this slide there's a link to a good blog
post that kind of explains why if he had noncommercial clause, it no longer
conforms to the the definition of open source. Other people use things like copy
left licenses or reciprocal licenses like GPL and also permissive licenses like
Apache and BSD and MIT. And then there's licenses that were created specifically
for hardware projects, one of which is the CERN Open Higher License, which I want to
talk more about specifically. So CERN, the physics laboratory here in Europe, they
have a open hardware repository. So they're developing these electronics. And
actually there was two great talks here in Congress from a couple electronics
engineers that work on the electronics there. So they're building electronics for
their physics experiments and they want to share that with other labs around the
world. So they have an open hardware repository. And as part of that, they
created the open hardware license and kind of give some background on this. One of
the people that runs the team there is Javier Serrano. He gave a cool interview
that's linked in the slides where he talks about their motivation behind this and in
why they have the open hardware repository and create the license. Though this can
get kind of confusing, there's not just licenses, there's also copyright and
patents. At the Open Hardware Summit a few years ago Ari Douglas gave a nice talk
about this so you can find that talk in the link there in the slides. He goes over
what might be good for your project, depending on what purposes you're trying
to achieve with your own project and kind of goes over the different options there.
But what's the whole point of all this? So the reason you might want to make your
project open source hardware is that you want to enable collaborative development.
So we're talking about the idea here is that you're going to share your design
files in your hoping other people will help to contribute to your project,
contribute to the design of your hardware. So I would say that's like the main reason
to release the design files for your project is open source hardware. If you're
not interested in other people collaborating on your project, then it
might not be the right thing for your project. So it's good to consider whether
or not you want to have other people contribute to your project. So I
mentioned, well it was mentioned at the beginning: I'm part of the Open Source
Hardware Association. So we're a nonprofit based in the US, even though we do have
board members around the world. We have Mathias, who's one of our board members in
Vienna. I'm actually based in Berlin now as well. So one of the things we do is we
host the definition of what open source hardware is. We also have things like best
practices guide, a checklist that you can go through to see if you're releasing all
the things you need to for open source hardware project. But the main thing that
we do is we helped organize this event called the Open Hardware Summit, and
that's going to be coming up in March of 2020 in New York City. So hope to see some
of you there if you can make it. This will be our tenth one. And so we started in
2010. This year, though, we decided to do something a little bit different. So we
had Open Hardware Month. So Idea with this is, we wanted to have people from around
the world do locally organized meet ups and talks and workshops that kicked off
with one in some in Vienna and Colorado in the US. And it was really cool. We had 40
events in 14 different countries and we'll be doing it again in 2020. So hopefully
some of you can get involved with events wherever you're located. And if you're
wondering what happens with the Open Hardware Summit, you can check out the
talks from our last one, which was in 2018. Give you an idea of what happens
there. In kind of some insight into the different sorts of the projects people are
doing. I do a lot electronics, but there's a lot more than that. There's people that
are doing science and art and design, all sorts of different things. One of the
other things we do with the Officers Heart Association is we have a certification
program. So this is self certification program. You got a
"certificate.oshwa.org". And you you fill out the name, your project, the license
you're using linked to your design files, linked to your documentation, and then you
get this logo that you can use. And kind of one of the value of this, if you're
making a project, is you can put that on your packaging or I put it on like the
silk screen of my board. So then people can really easily identify that it's open
hardware and then they can go to that Web site and they can type an I.D. number and
be able to pull up the page that links them to the documentation, the design
files. And then for people that are looking for like I want a certain type of
device and I want to find one that's open source hardware. If you see this logo, you
can go and look that up in the database and find out more about it. So if you're
interested and know more about the Open Source Hardware Association, you can go to
"oshwa.org". You can join as a member of the association. We also have a mailing
list and a forum. If you want to check us out on Twitter, the "@OHsummit" is the
Open Hardware Summit account, where we have a lot of activity going on right now
about that because it's coming up in March. Mean, our executive director,
Alicia Gib, who's one of the people that started this summit, she wrote a book
called Building Open Source Hardware, and it has essays from different people that
have built open hardware projects. So it's a good thing to check out if you're
wanting to see what different experiences people have had with that. So the point of
all, the kind, the main theme of this talk was about Linux on open source hardware,
which is my two favorite things. So one of my favorite projects was developed by
Bunnie, who gave an awesome talk on the first day here at Congress. And Sean Cross
(xobs) he was giving a workshop right now on the FOMU. So this was a completely open
source laptop for everything, including the all the electronics were were open
source. And at the time when this came out, like four or five years ago, it was
it was a pretty decent system. I have one and I used it for for many years. So this
is a really cool idea of having a laptop that I can use every day. That's open
hardware. And it had some cool features like an FPGA and a software defined radio.
And then if you're wondering what's kind of coming up next, if you go to the CDC,
CDC area here at Congress, you can see the reform laptop. So Lucas from MNT is there.
He has this is a completely open source hardware laptop. The electronics, the
mechanical design, everything. So I recommend you go check that out. It's
really cool. It's in the CDC area, which is the critical decentralized cluster. So
one of the other things I'm involved with is a "beagleboard.org". So we're a
nonprofit organization that helps design open hardware computers. That is
everything for people from makers to students, even Professionals that are
designing into their projects. And what we do is we work with different manufacturers
and we also work with the community to come up with designs that are useful. So
this started off with the Beagle Board back in 2008, so this was kind of the
first low cost ARM development board. In back at that time a lot of people were
needing ARM hardware to port their free software and open source software to ARM,
and the board was pretty popular for that. We followed it up with littleler board
called the BeagleBone, which fits into the old toys tin, if you've seen those mid
tins, if you've probably used the BeagleBone your probably most really with
the beagle bone black, which was, I would say still our most popular board. So kind
of the theme here is because it's open source hardware, there's a whole bunch of
different BeagleBones made by different manufacturers with different features and
different price points like a SeedStudio decided probably most people don't care
about HDMI, so they took the HDMI off to save some cost. Arrow wanted to make one
that worked with industrial temps, so they it's a little bit more expensive, but it
has industrial temp components on it. And then one of the things that's important
with open source hardware is we want people to be able to take the design files
and make derivatives. So we have this smaller one called the PocketBeagle. The
cool thing about this is a pretty simple circuit board. It has something called the
system in package that integrates a lot of the chips. So it makes the board layout
really simple. So this is just a four layer circuit board and it's available in
Eagle and also in Key CAD. And if you have some experience like if you go over to the
hardware hacking area, you can learn to do surface mount assembly and with a little
bit of experience, you could order the board, order the parts and build your own.
Or as Kumar did, he wanted to make a logic analyzer board. So he took the design of
the PocketBeagle and he added on the features he needed, like the inputs for
the probes. And he also added a gigabit networking. So this is kind of cool to see
people take the design in the PocketBeagle and then modify it for their project for
their use case. And here's an example of the the logo. So the latest boy we had was
the BeagleBone AI. So we registered that back in the summer. So it's US because it
was registered in the US as a country code and then it's 169. So it's just like a
sequential number. So it's easy for people to identify if they go to the git hub. OK.
It's open source hardware certified and then it links off to the page with the
database with information about it. So I wanted to mention, Olimex we're here in
Europe. And, you know, in Bulgaria is one of the best open hardware companies, in my
opinion. And they have a line of open source hardware, Linux computers called
the OLinux. We know. And the person behind Olimex fed. has a great blog post about
open source hardware and why it matters to them. So a few years ago, they wanted to
create a ARM 64 bit ARM board that was completely open source and designed in
KiCAD, which is a free software open source circuit design software. Tsvetan
and gave a nice talk at FOSDEM a few years ago about the process of them switching
from their proprietary CAD software over to KiCAD and designing this open source
hardware board. So and then if you've not heard of KiCAD before or KiCAD doesn't
really matter what you say. Some people say "Keycad" some people say "kaicad" but
it's open source software for designing circuit boards. It's cross platform runs
on Macs, Windows and Linux. And one of the cool things about it now is. There's
developers at CERN that are working on it. And the project leader, Wayne, is now
working on a full time is this job. So it's cool to see a lot of the developers
now being able to do it as their day job. So it's kind of getting critical mass in
that way. And if you want to try it out, I recommend if you search on YouTube for
"Getting to Blinky", it's a nice tutorial about teaches you how to go through and
make a little board that blinks an LED. So Olimex took that board that they designed
in KiCAD, the OLinux we know, a 64, and they wanted to make a laptop with it. So
that's called the terrorists One the design files are git hub for it. So the
idea there is to make a modular laptop that people can put different boards in
and things like that. Another interesting open hardware project was the "chip",
which you might have heard of, it was built as a nine dollar computer. They had
a really successful Kickstarter back in 2015. Unfortunate that company went on a
business in 2018 three years later. But the cool thing about it was it was all
open source hardware, the schematics, the PCB, the build materials. And if you see
here, there is this really cool thing called the pocket ship, which was this
nice like handheld little Linux computer. It was really cool. But the company went
to business, which was unfortunate. But this one person, Christopher, he goes by
"Groguard". He designed his own board that plugs into the pocket chip. And if you
click on the link in the slides, you can see doom running on it, which is like, oh,
it's the demo that you show with a Linux system. Then he went and designed this
other board, which is pretty cool, so this fits into a popular form factor for
microcontroller boards called the Adafruit Feather form Factor. And this is a full
Linux system. And you can. It's fully open source and there is a crowdfunding
campaign for it. That happened earlier this year. So one of the things I also
want to talk about, especially here at Congress, is the idea of open source and
FPGAs. Then Well, I'll tell you about how that plays into Linux. So being the really
cool things that's happened over the last couple years and many some of the people
here, Congress have been a part of that. Like Clifford Wolff and David Shaw, and
other people have built free software tools that allows you to not have to use
the proprietary tools from the FPGA vendors kind of wrote a Overview of this
and recent issue with hacks based magazine. You can download the PDF for
free if you want to check that out. And one of the talks at Congress a few years
ago was from Clifford Wolf. So this kind of all started off with this one FPGA
called the iCE40. And he wrote kind of over time wrote different pieces of
software that you need to be able to take your design and put it onto an FPGA. So
that was for a part called the iCE40. So that was Project Ice Storm. And then a few
years later. David Shaw primarily helped develop open source software that lets you
put onto a more capable part called the ECP5. And then most recently, there's a
there's project x-ray and another project called Symbol Flow that's been working on
bringing open source tools to higher end of FPGAs. These Xilinx Series 7 FPGA,
they're going to add a lot more capabilities. So why is this important for
Linux? Well, if we have an FPGA that's capable enough, we can put a soft core in
there and then we can potentially run Linux on that soft core. So Greg is here
at Congress and he designed this really cool board. This also an Adafruit form
factor called the orange crab. And actually yesterday he got Linux to run on
it, which was really fun. So this is a open source hardware board. You can
download the designs of the board and it's using a soft core in a FPGA to run Linux.
One of the other boards came out of a hackerspace in Croatia "radiona.org", and
that's also using the ECP5 FPGA and that's capable of running Linux as well. And
they're doing about to do a crowdfunding campaign now so you can check that out on
"crowdsupply". And David Shaw was one of the open source developers. He created
this "ultimate" board called the 'Trellis Board', which I think would be probably
pretty attractive for running Linux. I think it has a gigabyte of DDR memories of
its pretty substantial system for running Linux and its open source. You can
download the plans and build it. And then recently, back in November, there was the
Hackaday Super Conference and everyone at the conference got this badge, which was
kind like this Gameboy form factor, but it has the ECP5 FPGA that allows us to have a
soft core on there and run Linux. So kind of some different options of open hardware
boards that are using soft cores in FPGA is to run Linux. And then one of the
people over in the open FPGA assembly here at Congress is a pretty cool picture, as I
was talking about, like a soft core. Well, what does that look like when it's an
FPGA? So this is kind of a cool picture of what it looks like when all those
different gates are laid out inside the FPGA to have a Linux capable processor
core. So one of the ways that we do this is so we talk about a soft core, well, how
do you make that? And one of the important pieces software that all these boards that
was is showing you use is a project called "LiteX". So this is a pretty interesting
way of creating a system on chip inside the FPGA. An extra uses a Python based
language called Migen. And if you're interested in it, I'd recommend checking
out this blog posts from Bunnie where he talks about the advantages of it. And it
gives you things like it gives you like a DRAM controller, Ethernet controller, PCI
controller SATA controller so you can take those pieces of IP and put them together
for what you need for your project. And then in terms of the soft core we can, one
of the things that LiteX gives you is the ability to run a RISC-V soft core. So that
project's called LiteX on Linux or Linux on LiteX, and that's what the Orange Crab
is using in the HackaDay badge and those other projects, the radio and a board.
That's how it's running. There's a couple of projects that are doing similar things
as well. But the Linux on LiteX is one of the ones that a lot of people are using
and a screenshot of what it looks like when it boots up. So I was already kind of
talking about RISC-V a bit and if you're not familiar with it. You probably heard
of like x86 intelx86 or ARM. That's an instructions that it's the instructions
that the processor executes. You write code, it gets compiled into instructions
that run on the processor. So RISC-V is an instructions set that came out of
university, California, Berkeley, in it's a free and open source instruction set. So
anyone can take this instruction set and implemented in a in a chip like an FPGA or
actually make a actual silicon chip. So one of these examples of this is there are
there's a university in Columbia and they decided to make their own microcontroller
based on RISC-V called the Open-V. So this is really cool. It was fully open sourced
chip then design of the whole chip is open source and it can run the RISC-V
instruction set. However, it's not quite good enough to, or it's not capable enough
to run Linux and fortunately gets more meant for microcontroller applications.
Another organization is called "lowRISC" and they were kind of founded with the
idea of being able to create a RISC-V based system on chip tech could do
something like be a basic smartphone. So they're still working on that. But I am
pretty excited this will happen in the future there. One of the people that
started lowRISC is Alex Bradbury, and he gave a interesting talk a few months ago
about the future of operating systems on RISC-V. So I recommend checking that out
if you're interested in like the ecosystem of the tool chains involved in things like
that. So similar to Oshwa. There is a organization for chip design called
"FOSSi", which is the free and open source Silicon Foundation, and they do a great
job of putting together all these different projects into events. They have
one called Orconf, which happens every year here in Europe. They also have a
conference now in the US called Latch-Up. That's going to be coming up in April at
M.I.T. They also host a web site, called "LibreCores". So people are designing this
open source chip designs or IP blocks for things like Ethernet or memory
controllers. And if you. They created LibreCores as a site that you can share
those. And so if I'm going to build an open source chip, I can go in there and
find different blocks or functionality I need. There was also an event earlier this
year called the Week of Open Source Hardware. So this is all hosted by Fossi.
They have all the talks online from these conferences if you want to check them out.
So one of the companies that was founded by some of the people that created the
RISC-V instruction set is called SiFive, and they've actually produced a few
commercial chips, one of which is this microcontroller here. And one of the co-
founders and CTOs has a interesting talk about their RISC-V ecosystem. And so like
companies like Western Digital have decided to switch all the core in their
drives over to RISC-V. And NVIDIA has decided to take out a little
microcontrollers in their GPUs and turn those over to RISC-V as well. This is a
microcontroller board based on that SiFive microcontroller, which is quite
interesting, but unfortunately can't run Linux on it. So one of the surprises last
year at Fossdem was Palmer from SiFive debut this board called the HiFive
Unleashed. So this is a multi core 64 bit board that can run Linux. It runs it
really well. The one downside to this is it was meant to be an evaluation board, so
it's quite expensive if it's a thousand dollars. So in it, they're not going to
ever make it in volume. So a little disappointing, but that. The other option
there. So there's these high end boards like this one. It's kind of expensive
because it's made in low volume. There's also some cheap microcontrollers. One is
called the, from Kendait the KT10. It is basically a microcontroller with a lot of
memory. And it, there is possibility to run Linux on it. So add Linux plumbers
this year when the people from Western Digital gave a talk about running Linux on
this kind of essentially a microcontroller. You can check out that
link there. There's a talk about it and there's slides from the conference.
They're also in the Lenny's kernel. They started adding support to be able to run
Linux on these RISC-V, essentially microcontrollers. It's not great, but it's
kind of like we're gonna have to work what we have with what. We have to work with,
what we have right now. If you're interested more in more about how Linux
runs on RISC-V, then you can check out this talk from hot chips a few months ago
and it goes into like how the Linux kernel works on RISC-V. And the other cool thing
is both Debian and Fedora have initial distributions now for RISC-V. And if you
don't have hardware like that unleashed board, you can still try this out on your
computer using an emulator called QEMU. So one of things is exciting is like two
weeks ago at the RISC-V summit in California NXP announced that there's
going to be a chip early next year that's going to be a Linux capable SoC. So this
is quite exciting. This could allow us to make like a board that wouldn't be too
expensive and be pretty high performance. So one of things I want to hopefully maybe
be a part of or encourage people to do is make a board that's less than one hundred
dollars that runs risk five. One route is we use FPGA as another route is maybe when
this chip comes out, there'd be a possibility and then could we do it by the
next CCC? I don't know if you're interested in this. Get in touch. I would
like to try and get a community effort going around this idea of making a RISC-V
board that can run Linux. So I don't know if I have any time left, but I'm happy to
take questions. [filler please remove in amara]
*applause* [filler please remove in amara]
Herald: Thanks, Drew, yes. We actually do have some time left. Actually, about 10
minutes. So if you do have questions, pile up at the microphones that you see here.
And we start with a question from the Internet. Sure. Take your time. Just start
talking into the microphone. Yeah. Why is the microphone off the signal angel not
working? All right. We just started with a question from microphone number two then,
while the signal angel is working out his microphone. There you go.
Mic 2: Hi. Is this working? Yes. Herald: Move close to the microphone.
*touches the microphone* Herald: It is on, It is on.
Mic 2: Hi, Drew. Thank you very much. Thanks very much for the talk. I've been
having a lot of fun using your pocket beguiling combination with the Bella
system. Drew: Oh?
Mic 2: Actually, I've been able to get it on stage on the Royal Albert Hall earlier
this year. And one of the things I'm really enthused about in that project is
that using the center of my realtime operating system. It really seems super.
Yeah. The breach between the low latency performance of a microprocessor and the
the Octopus connects to everything in low entry to development of Linux world. As
you see more of these examples using ?????? or order.
Drew: Yeah. So just to give people that are familiar with the terms a little bit
of background, ??????????, essentially this co kernel, it runs alongside Linux
and allows you to do like real time tasks like in this case audio like low latency
audio for instruments or other things like doing motor control. The Linux kernel
developers have been doing a lot of work of getting the Linux kernel to run great
with real time tasks, but depends on what your deadlines are. So for things like
building instruments, those are pretty latency sensitive and ?????????? running
around of doing that. So if you're interested in other projects called
Machine Kit, it's an open source CMC controller. They simply have deadlines
like having to read a motoring coder or send out pulses to a stepper motor. So,
you know, I think it really did. So with real time things is what you're talking
about. It really depends on what your deadlines are like. So in the case of
Bella, they're still using ????????? because they need to be, they need a
certain minimum latency, that they can still only achieve with that. But I will
say with the linux kernel, there's been a lot of work that's been going on. And the
linux kernel was much better than it used to be in terms of handling real time
tasks. Mic 2: OK, cool.
Drew: And if you're interested in Bella, I think there's someone from the team here
in the room, so.. Mic 2: Really?
Drew: Yeah, you can have.. Herald: The person identifying is
themselves here. All right. Mic 2: Thank you.
Herald: Thanks for the question. Thanks for the answer. Let's have another try
with the Internet? Signal Angel: Is using open source
software hardware design required or enforced to get the open hardware
certification? Drew: Yeah, that's a really good question,
which I didn't clarify enough. So according to the open source hardware
definition that we have from Oshawa, you can use whatever software you want. One of
the reasons is for certain types of things, especially like mechanical design,
proprietary software is still the norm. This is also the case with circuit design.
Kicad has only really got in like really good and stable probably the last five
years. So kind of as a matter of practicality, 10 years ago, like most
people were still using proprietary software to design mechanical designs and
software designs. Ideally, I think, you know, if the ideas you want enable
collaboration, using free software, using open source software would enable as many
people as possible to be able to contribute to your project. But it is not
according to our definition that we have hosted on Oshawa, is not a requirement. So
say best practice, use free software but it is not required.
Herald: Thanks. Microphone number one, please.
Mic 1: How far is the performance for everyday computing on RISC-V. Like can I
run my everyday programing toolchain on a RISC-V processor?
Drew: You could run it? The one downside to the soft core is on these FPGA is so
like the ECP 5 which I mentioned, it's only running at maybe 50 megahertz, 100
megahertz. One of the reasons I brought up cymbal flow and project x ray is that's
going to enable us to use open source tools on these higher end Xilinx FPGAs
which will unlock greater performance still with soft cores. It's going to be if
you're looking to be competitive with like ARM and Intel, it's not going to be there.
But one of the cool things that think about is an FPGA. So you have a lot of
flexibility like in terms of the peripherals you can do, you know, so kind
of getting creative in terms of, well, maybe the clock speeds aren't really fast,
but it's enough PGA so you could add hardware accelerators to do things that
you might otherwise be burning cycles on our processor to do. But that's also why
I'm hoping people will start making chips. I'm excited about that. And XP
announcement because yeah, like we need silicon to have like the performance that
we're used to on like ARM and Intel. Herald: Thanks. We have yet another
question from the Internet. Signal Angel: Do you think it's feasible
to create a package manager for open hardware like paper or NPM?
Drew: That is a good question and I think one of the things that I would say like
open, open hardware is almost kind of like 20 years behind open source software. And
I think one of the reasons is a lot of the tools that people use for designing
hardware. It's difficult to collaborate on designs. You know, a lot of these CAD
programs like it's not the same as like source code, like, you know, I store all
my hardware designs in github. But if I look at like the diffs in git, like, you
know, they're not very meaningful. So I think one of the issues we have is for
people to collaborate and hardware like we need better tools that allowed us to track
changes. And in Nick do puri question merges in a more meaningful way. So I'm
sure everyone here that sees CAD tools and tried to work with other people. It can be
it can be difficult. So I think that's an area that can be improved in terms of like
hosting things. You know, I just talked to someone today that talked about the Open
Source Hardware Observatory where they were trying to like collect lots of
different projects. So I think we can definitely have Web sites that like show
what projects are out there. But in terms of like being able to like collaborate on
things like libre course, check out libre course, they're trying to do that as well
for processor design, being able to go on there and like grab either net controller
or a memory controller in a way, actually a chip design almost better because if you
look at the hardware design languages, it's more like source code. But yeah.
Kicad is difficult to collaborate on still, I think.
Herald: All righty. Microphone number one, please.
Mic 1: During the presentation, you mentioned that there are several great
products trying to develop software for FPGA for commercial FPGA devices. I was
wondering if you are aware of any products trying to develop open source FPGA
architecture or something similar to RISC-V instruction set about for a FPG
world? Drew: Right. So yeah. The other thing here
is so we're talking about open source tools for getting things on to FPGAs, but
there's also the idea of like the open source chip design. So I don't personally
I'm not heard of any like projects where they're trying to do like an open source
FPGA. But I think if you if you have time stopped by the open FPGA assembly and also
over and in the hardware hacking area. Tim and Tim and Sloan's jobs are over there.
And they they know a lot about things that are happening there as well. But I think
it would be cool and Bunny's talk here at Congress on the first day was about the
idea of like using FPGA is because they're more easier to inspect in if we can make
like an open source FPGA chip. I think they'd be in better.
Herald: Another question from the Internet, please?
Signal Angel: What about performance per watt?
Drew: I'm sorry? Signal Angel: What about performance per
watt? Drew: With RISC-V or FPGA or..
Signal Angel: Both I think. Drew: Both, yeah. Probably FPGA is not
great with that because, you know, as compared to an asic or silicon design they
are not as power efficient. RISC-V, I don't know. I've not seen a whole lot of
numbers around that. You know, I think it's still kind of early days when it
comes to RISC-V. Also, like a lot of it's still soft cores and FPGAs, but you're not
going to be as great in terms of power. But there is a project out of ETH Zürich
of the university called Pulp P U L P and it stands for parallel ultra low power. So
that's a family of RISC-V cores. So check out pulp from ETH Zürich. I think they're
trying to do low power things. Herald: Good question, though. Microphone
number one. Mic 1: Thanks for the great talk. So as
you mentioned, there's a lot of NDAing and copyrighting going on in the hardware
world. So one of the slides you showed showed the risk 5 quad with an ??
interface next to it. So my question is, do we have all the components, the
peripheral components to make a full processor, on open source? So it there
still gaps in there? Drew: I think there's still a lot of work
to be done there. And that's something that Light X is trying to do like to pull
together these different IP blocks you need to build the system on CHIP. Same
thing with libre of cause. But if you take a look at ??? 5, like not everything. So
the core is open source, but in order to tape out a chip that had certain
functionality like not all of the IP on there is open source. So I think that is
something that hopefully in the future as more people start doing open source IP for
chip design, we can hopefully have all the different blocks that we need to make a
chip like one of the things CY 5 is missing on their chips is, is USB, you
know, traditionally people like it will get like USB controller from mentor
synopsis or something like that. So having good, you know, verified, proven IP for
these common peripherals is important. So yeah, it might be an open core, but then
it might have proprietary blocks around it. So there's a lot of room there for
improvement, I think. Herald: And with that, we're wrapping up.
Thank you very much for all of your interesting questions. Also, thank you
very much for all the angels working here. Thank you very much. To all the people
from Messe Leipzig, the Audio Video people who work. And of course, the biggest thank
you again to Drew. Thank you very much for the awesome talk. Another big, warm round
of applause, please. Thank you. [filler please remove in amara]
*applause* [filler please remove in amara]
*36c3 postrol music*
Subtitles created by c3subtitles.de in the year 2021. Join, and help us!