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Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night

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Re: Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night

#41

Post by empath75 »

Annatar wrote: post #35
PhilWright wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your only comments on HN seem to be to criticize RISC-V. The posters intention is not to start producing hardware, at no point does his project mention taping it out and manufacturing. Obviously it is just a fun side project to implement the RISC-V core ISA in an FGA. It was then made open-source on GitHub so anyone else interested can look at it. Chill out mate.

"Your only comments on HN seem to be to criticize RISC-V." And in that, he's not alone: have you looked at RISC-V ISA? Compared to MC68000, it's exceptionally retarded, even more so when compared to OpenSPARC. Extremely dumb ISA.

Calling things ‘retarded’ as an insult is a very juvenile thing to do.

Re: Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night

#42

Post by sergioisidoro »

/rant

"after one week of exciting sleepless nights of work (which explains the lots of typos you will found ahead), the darkriscv reached a very good quality result"

Not commenting on the actual quality of the code, but I wonder how can one make typos due to sleep deprivation, and yet produce "good quality results" in software.

I wonder when will we, as a community, stop praising all nighters and rushed work.

Re: Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night

#43

Post by kilburn »

simias wrote: post #38
inetknght wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Modern" desktop computing is perhaps less resource hungry than you think when you cut away so much graft of telemetry. None or barely few games, of course. But word processing, email, and pure HTML browsing without javascript? Maybe not HTML5's fancy features, but general rich text? I think it's very achievable.

My software "stack" hasn't changed in maybe 15 years now. It's emacs + firefox + terminal and a couple utilities here and there. It ran fine on my first computer with a single core ~1GHz CPU and 128MB of RAM (although multi-core architectures and more RAM did make it a lot easier to multi-task later). The only reason I upgrade my computer these days is to run modern games, for everything else except compilation I cou…

I don't know what "prohibitvely expensive" is in your case, but there's a possibility today:

Grab one HiFive Unleashed for $999 [1]:

- 4 cores up to 1.5Ghz

- 8Gb DDR4 ECC Ram

- 1Gbps ethernet

Then grab one HiFive Unleashed Expansion Board for $1,999 [2]:

- SSD M.2 Connector

- SATA3 Connector

- x16 PCIE Connector (4 lanes of pcie2)

- A bunch of other cool stuff you wouldn't probably use (SPI, FPGA, etc.)

Finally grab some M.2 Drive and a graphics card ($500 maybe?).

This would set you back a grand total of $3500, which is definitely way more expensive than the current mainstream but may fit within "non-prohibitively expensive" for some. The whole platform should be open source [3].

[1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unleashed [2] https://www.crowdsupply.com/microsemi/hifive-unleashed-expan... [3] https://www.sifive.com/products/hifive-unleashed/

Re: Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night

#45

Post by geezerjay »

sergioisidoro wrote: post #42

/rant "after one week of exciting sleepless nights of work (which explains the lots of typos you will found ahead), the darkriscv reached a very good quality result" Not commenting on the actual quality of the code, but I wonder how can one make typos due to sleep deprivation, and yet produce "good quality results" in software. I wonder when will we, as a community, stop praising all nighters and rushed work.

> I wonder when will we, as a community, stop praising all nighters and rushed work.

I agree, but it sounds like the author wanted to claim that he did something impressive in a small timeframe, thus suggesting to the reador some level of technical prowess. If the author claimed instead that he did it while well-rested in a couple of months then the achievement wouldn't be so impressive.

Re: Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night

#46

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

inetknght wrote: post #7
earenndil wrote: post #2

This is good news for risc-v! The fact that it can be implemented so easily by hobbyists furthers the cause of trusted hardware. Sure, it won't be implementable by hobbyists at the speeds necessary for modern desktop computing, but a trusted security core (something like a yubikey) could be implemented on completely from-scratch hardware, but then still use existing trusted/vetted software (openssl), just a cross-com…

"Modern" desktop computing is perhaps less resource hungry than you think when you cut away so much graft of telemetry. None or barely few games, of course. But word processing, email, and pure HTML browsing without javascript? Maybe not HTML5's fancy features, but general rich text? I think it's very achievable.

It isn't the telemetry that's slowing us down, but layers upon layers of (mostly needless) abstraction and buffer bloat.

Windows 95 had most of the things we use in a GUI environment today and it ran on a 486 with 8MB of ram. When packaged in Electron with a javascript x86 emulator it is still smaller than many modern text editors. Plenty of GUIs ran on significantly less.

Since the modern web is basically one of the worlds most overengineered and crufty VM platforms, I don't expect it would run very well, and that would probably be enough to doom the system in the eyes of many, sadly.

Re: Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night

#47

Post by tomhoward »

sergioisidoro wrote: post #42

/rant "after one week of exciting sleepless nights of work (which explains the lots of typos you will found ahead), the darkriscv reached a very good quality result" Not commenting on the actual quality of the code, but I wonder how can one make typos due to sleep deprivation, and yet produce "good quality results" in software. I wonder when will we, as a community, stop praising all nighters and rushed work.

There's a big difference between doing short bursts of work with little sleep - particularly when you're young - vs doing it constantly for months/years.

In this case it just seems to indicate enthusiasm for the project rather than dangerous overwork.

Re: Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night

#48

Post by waterhouse »

Annatar wrote: post #39
waterhouse wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you named anything specific about the RISC-V ISA that you think is retarded, you might contribute something to the conversation.

Again: have you looked at the assembler code? Are you able to compare MC68000 assembler and RISC-V assembler? Are you able to compare SPARC assembler and RISC-V assembler? Without being able to do that, it's going to be exceptionally difficult for me to contribute any more to the discussion, especially typing on a mobile telephone. That's my contribution for now, I'm pointing out what to compare with. That point was…

I carefully studied the 2.1 and 2.2 versions of the spec. I wrote, in Racket, a miniature interpreter for lists of RISC-V instructions (just symbolic lists, not the byte strings they assemble into), then wrote programs to compute triangular numbers and Fibonacci, and verified they worked. I've built the RISC-V toolchain and compiled a few test C programs and run them in "spike". I don't think I took more than a glance at the "gcc -S" output. I have no familiarity with SPARC or Motorola assembly, but I have decent familiarity with x86-64 assembly, having written what looks like a couple dozen miniature test programs and one medium-sized program, and having tried a few times to write a decent x86-64 assembler.

I found the RISC-V spec enjoyable to read, especially with all the rationales; it felt clean, minimal, and well-thought-out. Writing a program in it was probably not much different from writing in x86-64 assembly. The encodings seemed much easier to deal with than x86-64, though as mentioned I didn't go as far as writing an encoder.

What kinds of important features are present in SPARC or MC68k but not in RISC-V? Are they absent from x86-64 as well?

Re: Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night

#49

Post by shawnz »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #46
inetknght wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Modern" desktop computing is perhaps less resource hungry than you think when you cut away so much graft of telemetry. None or barely few games, of course. But word processing, email, and pure HTML browsing without javascript? Maybe not HTML5's fancy features, but general rich text? I think it's very achievable.

It isn't the telemetry that's slowing us down, but layers upon layers of (mostly needless) abstraction and buffer bloat. Windows 95 had most of the things we use in a GUI environment today and it ran on a 486 with 8MB of ram. When packaged in Electron with a javascript x86 emulator it is still smaller than many modern text editors. Plenty of GUIs ran on significantly less. Since the modern web is basically one of the…

What layers of abstraction are we stacking? Sure, there's electron/v8, but that's just one layer. You said yourself that notepad in an electron-based x86 VM is still pretty small, so clearly electron itself isnt the problem.

Maybe people just demand more from their software these days, and all these little conveniences just add up more than you'd realize? That would also explain why the system is not "doomed in the eyes of many" as you claim it ought to be.

Re: Open source RISC-V implemented from scratch in one night

#50

Post by bogomipz »

h4b4n3r0 wrote: post #26
moetech wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web is incredibly bloated unfortunately. I had to upgrade my RAM recently because I couldn't open too many browser tabs without making the system hang, even with javascript disabled. Apart from that, you can do almost everything from the command line so even an old Raspberry Pi could be usable as a desktop computer.

Take a look at Tab Wrangler extension. It closes tabs you haven’t used in a while.

I am curious if you how how this compares to The Great Suspender? I also don't understand why Chrome and Firefox don't buil tab managers directly into the browser.
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