Welcome to the first OpenRISC Conference

The first OpenRISC project conference - ORCONF 2012.

This is a conference which aims to bring together those involved with open source embedded systems development, from the transistor level up to Linux userspace and beyond. It is intended that the meeting would be useful for both developers and users of the platform to attend.

The event will run over Saturday, October 13 and Sunday, October 14.

The venue will be open from 11:00 on Saturday, with a light lunch available from 11:30 and presentations starting at 12:00.

ORCONF 2012 group photo, Twitter history

Previous ORConfs: latest

Conference Location

Realtime Embedded, Sveavagen 64, Stockholm, Sweden

Further details can be found here.

Some drinks and snacks will be provided at the venue by the sponsors on the day.

Conference Schedule

It is planned that the event will be run over Saturday and Sunday, with the bulk of the presentations on the Saturday.

Saturday

The day will formally begin at about midday, with a light lunch being provided from 11:30AM to encourage people to come along a little early.

There will be a brief welcome and introduction of the sponsors before we begin presentations.

Below is the running order of the day, estimated durations and times sessions are expected to start. There is slack in the schedule to allow for questions following presentations, and breaks.

For those that like their nostalgia in large doses can find a YouTube playlist of all videos.

Sunday

Summaries

Fall/Autumn 2012, Stockholm

Proposed dates are lunchtime Saturday 13 October through afternoon Sunday 14 October. This will allow people to fly in on the Saturday morning and out on the Sunday evening.

It really needs to cover both days. It will be hard to justify for international participants attending just a Saturday afternoon session. Jeremybennett 09:59, 7 June 2012 (CEST)

I think so, too. I would like to reconvene Sunday AM for some more presentations or discussions. Julius 13:48, 9 June 2012 (CEST)

I vote for the Saturday dinner as well and continuing on Sunday --Mgielda 16:05, 13 September 2012 (CEST)

Meeting dinner for Saturday evening? Jeremybennett 11:01, 6 June 2012 (CEST)

I'd very much like to get everyone out to dinner together. I'll mention it on the main page. Julius

Dinner Venue

This restaurant has been proposed : Sue Ellen - can I get some comments on whether people would like to go here or not? Julius 15:11, 2 October 2012 (CEST)

Looks good to me. I suggest you book it ASAP, or you won't get a table for 16 anyway. Jeremybennett 11:40, 5 October 2012 (CEST)

English menu for the restaurant here.

Session Proposals

The following are proposals for presentations or discussions for the meeting.

Please give an indication of what would be the nature and topic of the session. Please also list:

• how long it would likely be (a 5-minute lightning talk-like session up to 90 minute presentation/demonstration/discussion/Q&A)
• the intended audience (devs or users or any sub-group of either - OpenRISC Linux devs or users or RTL devs or users etc.)
• who you are (use the 3 tilde characters, see here)

mor1kx core presentation

A presentation of the new OR1k CPU implementation, demo it running and give an idea of its features, its implementation/verification approach, and its synthesis characteristics. I would invite Stefan Kristiansson to talk about about his portion of the design.

• Length: 30 minutes
• Audience: RTL devs and users
• Who: Julius
• Slides

OR1K architectural revision discussion

A discussion session to go over the proposed OR1K architecture amendments as detailed on the OR1K wiki Architecture_Specification#Proposed_changes.

• Length: 1 hour
• Audience: All devs
• Who: Julius

OR2K architectural discussion

A presentation/discussion session to go over the progress on the OR2K project.

• Length: 30 to 60 minutes
• Audience: anyone
• Who: Julius

Open source processes for OpenRISC

The OpenRISC project has grown to the stage where it needs better project management processes. Up until recently there was generally only one active developer for each component, who could be left to do their own thing. Now we have to co-ordinate multiple developers, with different agendas and different views on how processes should be managed.

OpenCores does not have a formal governing body, and it is unlikely this meeting can change this. However as the only gathering of the major contributors it is the best opportunity to get a concensus on the way to move forward. Key issues to discuss are:

• Process for review, approval and commit of changes. How do we choose lead developers/maintainers/approvers? When should we start a new version, and how?
• Structure of the project. Should ORPSoC be a separate project to OpenRISC (like minsoc)? Should the tools be a separate project as well? Should we have a project manager and if so how should he/she be chosen?
• Choice of version control system. Do we leave it to the lead developer to choose/change or do we establish a project-wide policy.
• Where should repositories live. Should they always be on OpenCores.org or always on openrisc.net or on the lead developer's GitHub/SorceForge account?
• Mailing lists and IRC. In addition to the OpenCores forum, we have two OpenRISC mailing lists, one run by opencores.org, one by openrisc.net. Last year's meeting achieved a concensus that for the time being all contributions would be cross-posted, pending the merging of the two lists (which was agreed to by both list owners). The lists have not been merged and the concensus is now breaking down, making entry for new participants very difficult. We also have two IRC channels on Freenode (#opencores and #openrisc) which both discuss the same subjects, but with a not completely overlapping set of contributors. How do we move forward?

When I look at the list above, it is clear that the questions are being asked in a vacuum. So I think we need an initial discussion on the question of "What is the primary purpose of OpenCores and OpenRISC?"

• to promote open source
• to promote open source in Silicon IP
• to design better processors
• to make cheaper designs available to industry
• to make it easier for people to learn how to design chips

These are difficult issues, but we cannot miss the opportunity to discuss them. It will be important to keep the discussion structured (hence my list above) and well chaired (to ensure all points of view are heard). Where concensus is reached, that can be used as an agreed process going forward. However the whole discussion should be documented, so where there is not agreement, we have a starting point for the future.

• Length: 90 minutes
• Audience: anyone involved in contributing to OpenRISC/ORPSoC
• Who: Jeremy

LLVM for OpenRISC

A number of contributors have been working on a port of LLVM for OpenRISC. This is an update on progress.

• Length: 30 minutes
• Audience: OpenRISC tool chain developers and users
• Who: Stefan and Simon Cook

Dynamic linking with OpenRISC Linux toolchain

Experimental support for dynamic linking is being added to the Linux toolchain. This is an update on progress.

• Length: 30 minutes
• Audience: OpenRISC tool chain developers and users
• Who: Stefan

ORPSoCv3

A number of problems has been identified with the current version of ORPSoC. ORPSoCv3 aims to fix this by having a more modular structure, reducing complexity for common operations and taking better advantage of the other components in the OpenRISC ecosystem.

• Length: 30 minutes
• Audience: RTL developers of OpenRISC and other IP cores for the wishbone bus
• Who: Olof
• ORPSoCv3 slides

OpenRISC for Newbies

Sven-Åke Andersson will do a presentation talking about his OpenRISC introduction blog series he recently did on rte.se.

• Length: 30 minutes
• Audience: Everyone
• Who: Sven-Åke Andersson
• Slides

eCos for OpenRISC

The eCos port for OpenRISC has recently had a makeover, and will be presented. The session will consist of explanations of the OS, how it works, details of the OpenRISC port and a demonstration of the software running on OpenRISC hardware.

• Length: 40 minutes
• Audience: all
• Who: Michał Giełda, Piotr Skrzypek of Ant Micro

Bug squashing session

We have a few long-standing bugs in bugzilla that just needs a little attention to be fixed. While we are all gathered, this could be an excellent opportunity to do some work. There are also some patches floating around on the mailing lists that were never dealt with properly. Some candidates for bug fixing and the kind of works that needs to be done follows:

Create testcase to verify. Update RTL Update arch. spec. Make a decision. Update some spec Make a decision. Update spec and/or RTL Make a decision. Update toolchain Update binutils Write a testcase Update or1ksim Write a testcase Update arch. spec Update arch. spec

• Length: 2 hours (?)
• Audience: All
• Who: All

OpenRISC development boards and modules

This presentation will give an overview of different hardware platforms suitable for realization of OpenRISC based systems. We will go through what is available today and take a look of upcoming boards with enhanced performance

• Length: 20 min
• Audience: all
• Who: Michael Unnebäck of ORSoC

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