#milkymist IRC log for Sunday, 2011-06-12

kristianpaulargh, all day all wrong because a missing wire !03:45
kristianpaulfortunatly sinthesis time is now 13~ minutes :-)03:46
wolfspraulwhy did it come down?03:57
kristianpaulwell, i just disable the cores i dont need from milkymist04:14
kristianpaulnothing special :-)04:15
wolfspraulwhich ones did you disable?04:17
wolfsprauland then the synthesis time came down from how many minutes to 13 minutes?04:17
wolfsprauljust curious to better understand the whole thing... synthesis time is quite important in effective fpga development work, from what I can tell so far :-)04:18
kristianpauldisable usb, tmu, fmlmeter, videoin, midi, dmx and ir04:21
kristianpaulbefore was 35 Minutes aprox04:22
kristianpaulis the only way so far to reduce, as i dont know how to hack/enable partial reconfiguration tecniques in this spartan-6, that also may allow effective development04:24
wolfspraulfrom what I understand so far, partial reconfiguration will send you into development hell04:25
wolfspraulit's this thing that the fpga industry talks about for 10 years, but I think that never really works well enough to be usable in real life, or maybe slowly it is, on some models, with some tools, etc.04:26
wolfspraulnot for Spartan-6, I think :-)04:26
kristianpaulwell, i dint hear lekernel complaing about it yet ;-)04:26
wolfspraulhe stays away from it because like I said, I think it's an area where the tools are just too bad04:26
wolfspraulit exists 80% in marketing, 20% in technical reality :-)04:26
wolfspraulmaybe the technical reality will catch up one day, maybe with the latest chips. For s-6, we should keep our hopes low.04:27
wolfspraulthat's my understanding at least04:27
kristianpaulsure i stay away :-)04:27
kristianpauli'm okay with my setup now04:27
rohwolfspraul: ever seen this device? http://www.chameleon.synth.net04:47
rohits said to be one of the nicest devices for 'making elektronic music' due to its flexibility. there was some talk about building a new one, but so far it hasnt gotten of the ground again. old ones around are traded for good money and the community is still alive.04:48
rohmaybe one could talk to them and see of teaming up to promote open source04:49
kristianpaulhey, good way of doing parties on datacenters ;-)04:50
wolfspraulroh: excellent link, thank you very much !04:52
wolfspraulI need to read through this a little, for now I've added it to the marketing leads at http://en.qi-hardware.com/wiki/Milkymist_One_marketing04:53
wolfspraulno I did not know about Chameleon before04:53
wolfspraulthat marketing page is a mess, basically I'm just collecting all sorts of leads for now04:54
rohwolfspraul: well.. its not open hw and completely open source sw, but the most important parts for the users are04:54
rohmaybe its possible to write code enabling people using a mm1 to apply their sound skins04:55
wolfspraulit's a nice link, very very good. Of course I don't expect people to just go crazy if they see m1, but if there is overlap, it is worthwhile to try to connect.04:55
wolfsprauland from just looking at their homepage for 2 minutes, I can definitely see overlap04:55
wolfspraulsomeone on the qi list pointed me to www.toplap.org, man, I had no idea something like that existed :-)04:56
wolfspraulLive Art Programming, urgh :-) I am sympathetic to their goals, but it sounds pretty exotic to me :-)04:56
rohi dunno so much about dsp(s) (yet) .. but maybe its possible to load a dsp next to the lm3204:57
wolfspraulI couldn't immediately figure out whether Live Art Programming was still alive or not, most dates seems to be around 2002-2007 or so04:57
wolfspraulmaybe a short art movement :-)04:57
wolfspraultheir mailing list archives are only for subscribers, that's when I gave up...04:58
wolfspraulChameleon sounds like closer to m1 even04:58
kristianpaul(dsp) of course! mm1 spartan6 have some slices for that, check DSP48A104:58
rohkristianpaul: is there free (open source) code for that?04:59
kristianpauland if' i'm not bad ac97 core implemented some FIR i think04:59
kristianpaulroh: as open as the xilinx sinthesizer is ;)04:59
rohkristianpaul: because maybe one doesnt need to be binary compatible to that motorola madness to port all these filters (they are called skins)04:59
rohkristianpaul: well.. cores can be fixed and other codecs can be soldered ;)05:00
kristianpaulso about the dsp, you can implement is as xilinx library, or with a bit more of work i guess do the modeling for the accumulators and multipliers05:03
kristianpauli guess05:03
kristianpaul(fix) i agree with first one05:03
wolfspraulroh: you are thinking about how to run some of the Chameleon stuff on m1?05:09
rohwolfspraul: exactly. what it would take to make the platform useable for people who wrote code for the chameleon before05:11
rohas in 'have real world experience with users on the resulting device/platform'05:11
rohthey use a 100mips 24bit dsp05:13
rohfixed point05:14
rohthey use RTEMS05:14
rohas an on on the coldfire cpu (40mhz)05:14
wolfspraulok, good!05:18
wolfspraultaking notes :-)05:18
rohfrom a first glimpse: some of the dsp code is or can be written in that specific asm05:20
rohand they provide you with an sdk to compile code for the dsp as well as libs to load the dsp with binaries from rtems (via header-includes etc)05:21
rohso porting somethint would mean removing the panel code (well.. there are 3 buttons and leds on mm1) and adding either compat layers to replicate the platform or rewriting that code portions. ah.. and redoing the asm code and or find a way to reuse it.05:22
-:#milkymist- *** Notice -- TS for #milkymist changed from 1307864334 to 125338322707:44
wpwrak(partial reconfig) i wonder why that would have to be so hard. could one not partition the resources in an fpga and treat partitions like independent chips ? (globally shared items would have to be characterized by the "core partition" and would be inputs to the synthesis of the other partition(s))09:48
wpwrakthis would at least allow the equivalent of separate compilation.09:49
lekernelwhat about global clock networks and long wires that go across a partially reconfigured region?09:55
wpwrakas long as you can characterize the clock, it would be just an input to the synthesis. just like an external clock. long wires would have to avoid the reserved partitions.10:04
wpwrakand of course, you would have to set aside enough room for making the necessary connections. maybe define some handover points.10:05
wpwrakthat may be crude but it would be a start. you can always add a smarter method later :)10:05
rohlekernel: hey. i sent gismo your phone number. he is/was in paris and will be in france this week14:55
rohwanted to find out which hackerspaces to visit and who to ask14:55
--- Mon Jun 13 201100:00
