Hello everyone,

I would like to announce the eminent release of MinSoC 1.0. With version 1.0, we aim at facilitating the user and developer adoption of the system. MinSoC shall provide a framework for installation, configuration, simulation and synthesis. This way, changes to system internals and design can be made more easily, hopefully leveraging the development of MinSoC and OpenRISC.

There have been no changes to the RTL or testbench codes and only very few firmware changes. As described above, the changes are in the framework.

These points summarize the newly implemented features:
-Installation and setup scripts: MinSoC required tools can be automatically installed and MinSoC can be automatically set up
-Unified project definition: define the project once, generate Icarus Verilog, ModelSim, ISE and Quartus projects
-Makefile system for synthesis: simply synthesize designs for Altera and Xilinx with "make all"
-board configuration: use a pre-built or port your board configuration.
-ModelSim simulation

Manuals for the usage of the release candidate can be found on our wiki under: http://www.minsoc.com/trunk:start

The system is simulatable out of the box. As soon as you take a pre-built board configuration, you can synthesize the design using the Makefile system.

Is your board not supported, it is easy to add the support. MinSoC still uses the traditional adaptation through minsoc_defines.v and creating the constraint file for pinout. To allow for synthesis however, you now need to specify the names for device and family part on a configure file. That's it.

You can still manually synthesize using your vendor workflow, on the wiki you find instructions on how to do so.

The design is functional, all that is missing for official release are tests on FPGA boards. Only spartan3a_dsp_kit has been tested for now. Therefore, this release is still a release candidate. It will remain release candidate for a month until 28th of November. On the following page you can follow the missing tests and steps to 1.0: http://www.minsoc.com/pm:to_do#create_branche_for_release-10

Specially interesting until there is to increase the number of supported boards. Anyone with a non-supported FPGA board can contribute. Detailed instructions to do so can be found under: http://www.minsoc.com/trunk:board_configuration

This release candidate is only possible because of the good discussions the community provided on MinSoC usage, thanks for that. But the special thanks go for the new maintainers of MinSoC which provided some of the new ideas and the initial codes which finally achieved their goals.

I wish you a good time with MinSoC-rc1.0,
Raul Fajardo

Raul,

I am upgrading my machine to ubuntu 11.10 and have tried twice to install your release with no luck. The first time it failed because the ftp server @ icarus was down and the second time it failed because the ftp server @opencores was down. Looks like you have to wait until all of them line up.

Why do we still rely on ftp? Couldn't we create a opencores project for the purpose of delivering the tool chains as well as we do with the IP? Having more than one way to get it would be useful.


Also it would help to create install scripts that are customized for each distro. Ubuntu has icarus and several other tools available via apt-get install. I would prefer to omit those installs from any other means.


John Eaton

Hi John,



I'm sorry for that. I don't administrate any servers, so I cannot tell. But I find the availability of the servers to be more tricky than I would expect. Maybe others rely on multiple mirrors and have possibly therefore a better availability.



Well, we could. But Subversion is not really the correct tool for hosting other tool sources and binaries. We could possibly even use Dropbox or some other third party servers for that.



I understand that. That would make more sense if there would be a whole project for that purpose. It is bothersome to install & compile all the tools and adapt them to your configuration. If we separate the installation from the adaptation, we could probably do better.

However, I went through the trouble of creating a single tool for installing in multiple systems, virtually any Distro & Cygwin. Of course, you have to accept some compromises in order to do something like that. I went for sources compilation for anything but the GNU toolchain. Sources compilation is the most portable option.

Since I am also as picky about my system as anyone else, I wouldn't like that any third party tool installs things in my system's directories. With that in mind, I install everything under a user selected directory, nothing else is touched. I know you still have issues as no automatic-updates and so on, but at least this is clean and works.

I still don't know what would be the best alternative for hosting and installing. I also went for the trouble because minsoc, actually the advanced debug system, works better with a patched version of gdb-6.8 which is not being supported by the community any longer.

I want users to use and develop the system and not to struggle with tools installation, versions, accepted patches and others. There is enough to do even when everything works. We don't have to put them through that extra effort. I noticed that if I want to do everything right, supporting multiple Distros, I'd never reach my goal. So I went for the compromises. But I would be in favour of any approach of enhancing this. And I hope the current script can help on that.

Best regards,
Raul

Raul,
So I tried your script on Ubuntu 11.10 and it failed trying to install the libusb stuff. I'm not sure why
because I ran the make files manually and they passed.

I had to give up on ubuntu 11.10 because Xilinx webpack doesn't run on it. I get a weird glibc error and a dump trace every time I run it


John Eaton

Sorry to hear.

I can't tell why it failed. But in the directory of minsoc-install.sh, you could possibly check progress.log and error.log. That would tell you why it failed.

looks like you are hitting a system limit with openjade when you build the docs.



openjade:./functions.sgml:110:24:E: element "FUNCPROTOTYPE" undefined
openjade:./functions.sgml:111:20:E: element "FUNCDEF" undefined
openjade:./functions.sgml:111:34:E: element "FUNCTION" undefined
openjade:./functions.sgml:112:21:E: element "PARAMDEF" undefined
openjade:./functions.sgml:112:48:E: element "PARAMETER" undefined
openjade:./functions.sgml:115:13:E: element "PARA" undefined
openjade:./functions.sgml:115:23:E: element "FUNCTION" undefined
openjade:./functions.sgml:115:105:E: element "XREF" undefined
openjade:./functions.sgml:115:176:E: element "FUNCTION" undefined
openjade:./functions.sgml:115:236:E: reference to entity "lt" for which no system identifier could be generated
openjade:./api.sgml:36:223: entity was defined here
openjade:./functions.sgml:119:47:E: element "REFENTRY" undefined
openjade:./functions.sgml:120:17:E: element "REFNAMEDIV" undefined
openjade:I: maximum number of errors (200) reached; change with -E option
openjade:/usr/share/sgml/docbook/stylesheet/dsssl/modular/html/dblink.dsl:203:1:E: XRef LinkEnd to missing ID 'function.usbclaiminterface'
openjade:/usr/share/sgml/docbook/stylesheet/dsssl/modular/html/dblink.dsl:203:1:E: XRef LinkEnd to missing ID 'function.usbopen'
openjade:/usr/share/sgml/docbook/stylesheet/dsssl/modular/html/dblink.dsl:203:1:E: XRef LinkEnd to missing ID 'function.usbfindbusses'
openjade:/usr/share/sgml/docbook/stylesheet/dsssl/modular/html/dblink.dsl:203:1:E: XRef LinkEnd to missing ID 'function.usbopen'
make[2]: *** [html/index.html] Error 1
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make: *** [all] Error 2
Error: Command: make Description: Installing libusb-0.1

Hello John, I use ubuntu since 9.10 version, and on all the versions I have been using ISE webpack. Here are my notes how to supplement the original driver: steps: - instaled Xilinx ISE Webpack, the cable driver instalation failed again - http://rmdir.de/~michael/xilinx/ sudo apt-get install libusb-dev - compile (make) setenv LD_PRELOAD /libusb-driver.so - sudo usermod -a -G lp $USER - logout - login (- modprobe parport modprobe parport_pc modprobe ppdev) (- In IMPACT cable configuration choose "paralel cable III") sources: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=795504 http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1008227.html I hope it will help. Last time I tried it on Monday on the latest Ubuntu and latest webpack a it really works for me. Regards, Radek

Hi John,

I was not able to reproduce your installation error. I installed Ubuntu-11.10 myself and ran the script successfully.

Besides the binaries, whose installation is proven by the script, I still had to install a package named texinfo because a makeinfo binary was required for the gdb installation.

After that, everything went fine.

I hope you are able to test the release candidate at some point.

Regards,
Raul