From venture37 at geeklan.co.uk Mon Nov 6 15:24:48 2017 From: venture37 at geeklan.co.uk (Sevan Janiyan) Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2017 15:24:48 +0000 Subject: [Ukfreebsd] A RISC-V themed evening at the BCS Message-ID: <9af81701-8c31-ffbc-712a-590eb5ecbced@geeklan.co.uk> Hello, This months OSSG / OSHUG meetup at the BCS is on the theme of RISC-V. To bring it back to the theme of FreeBSD, rb@ will be giving a talk on his work in FreeBSD for RISC-V. The event is free but you need to register, the details are below. Hopefully see you there. Sevan Event #62 - RISC-V, RISC-V, RISC-V On the 23rd November 2017, 18:30 to 21:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. This months meeting will be on the theme of RISC-V, an open Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) which started life at the University of California, Berkeley. Registration link: https://ossg231117.eventbrite.co.uk Closing date for bookings is Tuesday 21st November 2017 at 11:30 pm. No more bookings will be taken after this date. Bringing up cycle-accurate models of RISC-V cores - ----------------------------------------------- The openness of the RISC-V ISA has enabled the development of many open-source RISC-V cores with varying capabilities. Choosing an implementation that meets given requirements can be done to some extent by comparing specifications and other attributes of the cores, but any decision must be based on actual testing. Using Verilator to generate cycle-accurate models enables rapid development of testing platforms. This talk provides a report of our experience bringing up cycle-accurate models of two cores in particular, RI5CY from the PuLP project, and Clifford Wolf's PicoRV32. For testing, a software ecosystem consisting of a compiler, binary utilities, debugger, and an interface between the model and debugger accompanies the Verilator model. To compare the cores, we used the GCC test suite and the RISC-V ISA test suite for measuring correctness, and the Bristol/Embecosm Embedded Benchmark Suite (BEEBS) to compare performance. All code and scripts used for the implementation are open-source, and can be re-used by others who wish to do similar exercises with other RISC-V cores. * Edward Jones has a background in parsing techniques and works at Embecosm on LLVM and GNU toolchains. He is also involved in research by Embecosm to investigate ways in which the software tool chain can reduce program energy consumption. Edward Jones is a Computer Science graduate of the University of Kent. FreeBSD/RISC-V and Device Drivers - ------------------------------- The FreeBSD port to RISC-V 64-bit ISA was added in January 2016. FreeBSD is the first operating system that officially supported RISC-V in the main repository. Since its introduction, support has evolved, RISC-V privileged architecture has updated a few times. The platform is maturing making it suitable for general, commercial, research and educational use. The GCC v7.0 target for RISC-V was officialy upstreamed and NVIDIA is planning to ship all of their GPUs with RISC-V coprocessor enabled in the future. Several companies have announced the start of RISC-V chip development and many universities are taking RISC-V as a target architecture for doing research. The world first RISC-V microcontroller-class board HiFive1 was released and we are getting closer to the first general purpose board to become available! This talk will describe the current status of FreeBSD/RISC-V, toolchain and supported simulators. The porting process as well as describing the latest changes made to FreeBSD in order to support the latest RISC-V privilege specification (v1.10). This includes enabling by default FDT support and drivers attachment change, SBI interface, compiler flags/built-in definition changes, support for updated BBL boot loader, RISC-V privilege levels, initial pa ge tables build, page table entry flags and other changes. An overview of FreeBSD device drivers subsystem will also be covered describing the device frameworks, buses and kernel-interfaces that exists in FreeBSD (e.g. Newbus, cdevsw, bus_dma, SYSINIT, vt, sound, ifnet, spibus, etc), how to use and configure them and how to debug a device driver. This should answer the question: How to write device driver for FreeBSD/RISC-V? * Ruslan Bukin is a Research Associate at University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. He has been a FreeBSD user since 2002 and src committer since 2013. His main interests and contributions to FreeBSD are related to computer architectures support, performance monitoring technologies support, hardware tracing technologies (Intel PT), device drivers, DMA engines and DMA frameworks, hardware security (Intel SGX, CHERI), heterogeneous computing. Ruslan is the lead developer of the FreeBSD/RISC-V project. He obtained a Computer Science degree in 2008 from Peoples' Friendship University of Russia in Moscow Talk #3 - ----- TBA Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt. For overseas delegates who wish to attend the event please note that BCS does not issue invitation letters. From venture37 at geeklan.co.uk Mon Nov 6 16:18:13 2017 From: venture37 at geeklan.co.uk (Sevan Janiyan) Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2017 16:18:13 +0000 Subject: [Ukfreebsd] November's London *BSD meeting 28/11/17 Message-ID: <968d9375-4629-fe83-3733-b3adb10d7851@geeklan.co.uk> Hello, This months meeting once again will be at the pub called The Hand and Shears. Tuesday the 28th, 6:30 onwards?? The Hand & Shears 1 Middle Street Cloth Fair London EC1A 7JA Tel: 020 7600 0257 http://www.thehandandshears.co.uk Sevan From andrew at geekuni.com Mon Nov 13 21:47:04 2017 From: andrew at geekuni.com (Andrew Solomon) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2017 21:47:04 +0000 Subject: [Ukfreebsd] Perl class in London Message-ID: As part of the London Perl Workshop on Saturday November 25 I'll be giving a 2 hour free introduction to Perl for developers of other languages. https://goo.gl/xRUosA I look forward to seeing you there! Andrew From venture37 at geeklan.co.uk Thu Nov 16 15:47:48 2017 From: venture37 at geeklan.co.uk (Sevan Janiyan) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2017 15:47:48 +0000 Subject: [Ukfreebsd] A RISC-V themed evening at the BCS In-Reply-To: <9af81701-8c31-ffbc-712a-590eb5ecbced@geeklan.co.uk> References: <9af81701-8c31-ffbc-712a-590eb5ecbced@geeklan.co.uk> Message-ID: <0e7504b3-9fbb-2b64-802b-deaf9b1be0fc@geeklan.co.uk> Just a heads up that this is next Thursday. Apologies for the top post :) On 06/11/2017 15:24, Sevan Janiyan wrote: > Hello, > This months OSSG / OSHUG meetup at the BCS is on the theme of RISC-V. To > bring it back to the theme of FreeBSD, rb@ will be giving a talk on his > work in FreeBSD for RISC-V. > The event is free but you need to register, the details are below. > > Hopefully see you there. > > > Sevan > > > Event #62 - RISC-V, RISC-V, RISC-V > > On the 23rd November 2017, 18:30 to 21:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The > Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. > > This months meeting will be on the theme of RISC-V, an open Instruction > Set Architecture (ISA) which started life at the University of > California, Berkeley. > > Registration link: https://ossg231117.eventbrite.co.uk > Closing date for bookings is Tuesday 21st November 2017 at 11:30 pm. No > more bookings will be taken after this date. > > > Bringing up cycle-accurate models of RISC-V cores > - ----------------------------------------------- > > The openness of the RISC-V ISA has enabled the development of many > open-source RISC-V cores with varying capabilities. Choosing an > implementation that meets given requirements can be done to some > extent by comparing specifications and other attributes of the cores, > but any decision must be based on actual testing. Using Verilator to > generate cycle-accurate models enables rapid development of testing > platforms. > > This talk provides a report of our experience bringing up > cycle-accurate models of two cores in particular, RI5CY from the PuLP > project, and Clifford Wolf's PicoRV32. For testing, a software > ecosystem consisting of a compiler, binary utilities, debugger, and an > interface between the model and debugger accompanies the Verilator > model. > > To compare the cores, we used the GCC test suite and the RISC-V ISA > test suite for measuring correctness, and the Bristol/Embecosm > Embedded Benchmark Suite (BEEBS) to compare performance. All code and > scripts used for the implementation are open-source, and can be > re-used by others who wish to do similar exercises with other RISC-V > cores. > > > * Edward Jones has a background in parsing techniques and works at > Embecosm on LLVM and GNU toolchains. He is also involved in research > by Embecosm to investigate ways in which the software tool chain can > reduce program energy consumption. Edward Jones is a Computer Science > graduate of the University of Kent. > > > > FreeBSD/RISC-V and Device Drivers > - ------------------------------- > > The FreeBSD port to RISC-V 64-bit ISA was added in January 2016. FreeBSD > is the first operating system that officially supported RISC-V in the > main repository. > Since its introduction, support has evolved, RISC-V privileged > architecture has updated a few times. The platform is maturing making it > suitable for general, commercial, research and educational > use. The GCC v7.0 target for RISC-V was officialy upstreamed and NVIDIA > is planning to ship all of their GPUs with RISC-V coprocessor enabled in > the future. Several companies have announced the > start of RISC-V chip development and many universities are taking > RISC-V as a target architecture for doing research. The world first > RISC-V microcontroller-class board HiFive1 was released and > we are getting closer to the first general purpose board to become > available! This talk will describe the current status of FreeBSD/RISC-V, > toolchain and supported simulators. The porting process as well as > describing the latest changes made to FreeBSD in order to > support the latest RISC-V privilege specification (v1.10). This includes > enabling by default FDT support and drivers attachment change, SBI > interface, compiler flags/built-in definition changes, support for > updated BBL boot loader, RISC-V privilege levels, initial pa > ge tables build, page table entry flags and other changes. An overview > of FreeBSD device drivers subsystem will also be covered describing the > device frameworks, buses and kernel-interfaces that > exists in FreeBSD (e.g. Newbus, cdevsw, bus_dma, SYSINIT, vt, sound, > ifnet, spibus, etc), how to use and configure them and how to debug a > device driver. This should answer the question: How to > write device driver for FreeBSD/RISC-V? > > * Ruslan Bukin is a Research Associate at University of Cambridge > Computer Laboratory. He has been a FreeBSD user since 2002 and src > committer since 2013. His main interests and contributions to FreeBSD > are related to computer architectures support, performance monitoring > technologies support, hardware tracing technologies (Intel PT), device > drivers, DMA engines and DMA frameworks, hardware security (Intel SGX, > CHERI), heterogeneous computing. Ruslan is the lead developer of the > FreeBSD/RISC-V project. He obtained a Computer Science degree in 2008 > from Peoples' Friendship University of Russia in Moscow > > > Talk #3 > - ----- > TBA > > Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt. > For overseas delegates who wish to attend the event please note that BCS > does not issue invitation letters. > From venture37 at geeklan.co.uk Fri Nov 24 13:31:15 2017 From: venture37 at geeklan.co.uk (Sevan Janiyan) Date: Fri, 24 Nov 2017 13:31:15 +0000 Subject: [Ukfreebsd] A RISC-V themed evening at the BCS In-Reply-To: <9af81701-8c31-ffbc-712a-590eb5ecbced@geeklan.co.uk> References: <9af81701-8c31-ffbc-712a-590eb5ecbced@geeklan.co.uk> Message-ID: <7eb8ae27-e7aa-d614-ee3f-072d6c428e78@geeklan.co.uk> On 06/11/2017 15:24, Sevan Janiyan wrote: > FreeBSD/RISC-V and Device Drivers > - ------------------------------- Slides: https://people.freebsd.org/~br/freebsd_riscv.pdf Sevan From venture37 at geeklan.co.uk Tue Nov 28 14:48:08 2017 From: venture37 at geeklan.co.uk (Sevan Janiyan) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2017 14:48:08 +0000 Subject: [Ukfreebsd] November's London *BSD meeting 28/11/17 In-Reply-To: <968d9375-4629-fe83-3733-b3adb10d7851@geeklan.co.uk> References: <968d9375-4629-fe83-3733-b3adb10d7851@geeklan.co.uk> Message-ID: On 11/06/17 16:18, Sevan Janiyan wrote: > Hello, > This months meeting once again will be at the pub called The Hand and > Shears. > > Tuesday the 28th, 6:30 onwards?? > > The Hand & Shears > 1 Middle Street > Cloth Fair > London > EC1A 7JA > Tel: 020 7600 0257 > http://www.thehandandshears.co.uk bump. Sevan From venture37 at geeklan.co.uk Wed Nov 29 02:28:07 2017 From: venture37 at geeklan.co.uk (Sevan Janiyan) Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2017 02:28:07 +0000 Subject: [Ukfreebsd] Notes from last nights meeting Message-ID: <22a208e1-035d-9281-cd88-3113c60a231c@geeklan.co.uk> Ruslan's RISC-V talk http://oshug.org/event/62 Hetzner's quality of hardware MCA as a potential alternative to PCI-E as a cheaper licensed bus for RISC-V ZFS woes back in the day (broken upgrades in FreeBSD 8, bootloader size issue) Ryzen ECC support (ASRock a safe bet) FreeBSD drm-next (hdmi support demonstrated working by Ruslan) Western Digital to switch to using RISC-V Unix Internals: The New frontiers https://www.pearson.com/us/higher-education/program/Vahalia-UNIX-Internals-The-New-Frontiers/PGM105013.html Kirk McKusick's video courses Smoking Perl (1.5 days on a G4 macmini to run 4 build runs on bleeding edge perl) HP 3000 hardware UnicOS features Soldiers of fortune(1) and the crusade for the land on the upper hand Software craftsmen Robert Martin - "What killed Smalltalk could kill Ruby, too" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX3iRjKj7C0 ESR and the projects he maintains Adding a Itanium to the hardware collection in 2017 From theraven at FreeBSD.org Wed Nov 29 09:46:50 2017 From: theraven at FreeBSD.org (David Chisnall) Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2017 09:46:50 +0000 Subject: [Ukfreebsd] Notes from last nights meeting In-Reply-To: <22a208e1-035d-9281-cd88-3113c60a231c@geeklan.co.uk> References: <22a208e1-035d-9281-cd88-3113c60a231c@geeklan.co.uk> Message-ID: On 29 Nov 2017, at 02:28, Sevan Janiyan wrote: > > Robert Martin - "What killed Smalltalk could kill Ruby, too" Odd argument. The thing that killed Smalltalk was taking an implementation detail of the Alto version (a microcode VM) as a religion and refusing to acknowledge that code in other languages is also important. For all of their faults, Python and Ruby make it comparatively easy to use libraries written in other languages, so you?re not stuck making a choice of rewriting billions of lines of useful code or abandoning your favourite language. David From dot at dotat.at Wed Nov 29 11:56:14 2017 From: dot at dotat.at (Tony Finch) Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2017 11:56:14 +0000 Subject: [Ukfreebsd] Notes from last nights meeting In-Reply-To: References: <22a208e1-035d-9281-cd88-3113c60a231c@geeklan.co.uk> Message-ID: David Chisnall wrote: > On 29 Nov 2017, at 02:28, Sevan Janiyan wrote: > > > > Robert Martin - "What killed Smalltalk could kill Ruby, too" > > Odd argument. AIUI he believes TDD is a panacea and that all other software reliability techniques are irrelevant. Not a very interesting person. Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch http://dotat.at/ - I xn--zr8h punycode Fisher, German Bight: North backing northeast, but cyclonic for a time, 3 or 4, increasing 5 or 6. Moderate or rough. Wintry showers, perhaps thundery later. Good occasionally poor. From venture37 at geeklan.co.uk Wed Nov 29 20:01:28 2017 From: venture37 at geeklan.co.uk (Sevan Janiyan) Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2017 20:01:28 +0000 Subject: [Ukfreebsd] Notes from last nights meeting In-Reply-To: References: <22a208e1-035d-9281-cd88-3113c60a231c@geeklan.co.uk> Message-ID: On 11/29/17 09:46, David Chisnall wrote: > Odd argument. The thing that killed Smalltalk was taking an > implementation detail of the Alto version (a microcode VM) as a > religion and refusing to acknowledge that code in other languages is > also important. For all of their faults, Python and Ruby make it > comparatively easy to use libraries written in other languages, so > you?re not stuck making a choice of rewriting billions of lines of > useful code or abandoning your favourite language. The angle he was coming from is having an image which can go off on into a tangent with without a revision control system. The environment is very flexible and lets you explore but it's easy to get lost with no way back, ending up with an application which can't back down to a previous state. We ended up discussing him because of his Clean Architecture book which Simon had just finished reading. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Clean-Architecture-Craftsmans-Software-Structure/dp/0134494164 Sevan From venture37 at geeklan.co.uk Wed Nov 29 20:32:27 2017 From: venture37 at geeklan.co.uk (Sevan Janiyan) Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2017 20:32:27 +0000 Subject: [Ukfreebsd] Notes from last nights meeting In-Reply-To: References: <22a208e1-035d-9281-cd88-3113c60a231c@geeklan.co.uk> Message-ID: <8EA3A06B-60AE-4B69-A97E-32CC4444D592@geeklan.co.uk> > On 29 Nov 2017, at 11:56, Tony Finch wrote: > > AIUI he believes TDD is a panacea and that all other software reliability > techniques are irrelevant. Not a very interesting person. In the world of Ruby & Java, do you have any better options than unit tests? Sevan From james at netinertia.co.uk Wed Nov 29 20:36:09 2017 From: james at netinertia.co.uk (James O'Gorman) Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2017 20:36:09 +0000 Subject: [Ukfreebsd] Notes from last nights meeting In-Reply-To: <22a208e1-035d-9281-cd88-3113c60a231c@geeklan.co.uk> References: <22a208e1-035d-9281-cd88-3113c60a231c@geeklan.co.uk> Message-ID: <20171129203609.GE91593@netinertia.co.uk> On Wed, Nov 29, 2017 at 02:28:07AM +0000, Sevan Janiyan wrote: > Hetzner's quality of hardware I assume this was more of a negative discussion... :-) James From venture37 at geeklan.co.uk Wed Nov 29 21:15:23 2017 From: venture37 at geeklan.co.uk (Sevan Janiyan) Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2017 21:15:23 +0000 Subject: [Ukfreebsd] Notes from last nights meeting In-Reply-To: <20171129203609.GE91593@netinertia.co.uk> References: <22a208e1-035d-9281-cd88-3113c60a231c@geeklan.co.uk> <20171129203609.GE91593@netinertia.co.uk> Message-ID: <67330c43-a182-fe29-0b50-4ed9ade3e55d@geeklan.co.uk> On 29/11/2017 20:36, James O'Gorman wrote: > I assume this was more of a negative discussion... :-) XD Everyone's experience with dud hardware and positive response to speedy replacement. Sevan From dot at dotat.at Thu Nov 30 13:38:08 2017 From: dot at dotat.at (Tony Finch) Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2017 13:38:08 +0000 Subject: [Ukfreebsd] Notes from last nights meeting In-Reply-To: <8EA3A06B-60AE-4B69-A97E-32CC4444D592@geeklan.co.uk> References: <22a208e1-035d-9281-cd88-3113c60a231c@geeklan.co.uk> <8EA3A06B-60AE-4B69-A97E-32CC4444D592@geeklan.co.uk> Message-ID: Sevan Janiyan wrote: > > On 29 Nov 2017, at 11:56, Tony Finch wrote: > > > > AIUI he believes TDD is a panacea and that all other software reliability > > techniques are irrelevant. Not a very interesting person. > > In the world of Ruby & Java, do you have any better options than unit tests? Ruby's probably a lost cause but Java has plenty of other options, e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/97599/static-analysis-tool-recommendation-for-java https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22712961/what-is-the-difference-between-agitar-and-quickcheck-property-based-testing Or you can head off into Kotlin or Scala territory :-) Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch http://dotat.at/ - I xn--zr8h punycode Fair Isle: North 6 to gale 8, backing west or northwest 5 or 6 later. Rough or very rough, becoming moderate or rough. Wintry showers, rain later. Good, occasionally poor. From venture37 at geeklan.co.uk Thu Nov 30 14:55:30 2017 From: venture37 at geeklan.co.uk (Sevan Janiyan) Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2017 14:55:30 +0000 Subject: [Ukfreebsd] Notes from last nights meeting In-Reply-To: References: <22a208e1-035d-9281-cd88-3113c60a231c@geeklan.co.uk> <8EA3A06B-60AE-4B69-A97E-32CC4444D592@geeklan.co.uk> Message-ID: <31743a15-1058-e44d-821a-d106bd75defc@geeklan.co.uk> On 30/11/2017 13:38, Tony Finch wrote: > Ruby's probably a lost cause but Java has plenty of other options, e.g. > > https://stackoverflow.com/questions/97599/static-analysis-tool-recommendation-for-java > https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22712961/what-is-the-difference-between-agitar-and-quickcheck-property-based-testing Interesting, I didn't realise about the static analysis tools, certainly Brendan Gregg has done things on the dynamic side. The angle Robert Martin is coming from is as a Java dev talking to Ruby devs. lol @ Crap4j http://www.crap4j.org > Or you can head off into Kotlin or Scala territory :-) steady :) Sevan From david at cantrell.org.uk Thu Nov 30 17:04:33 2017 From: david at cantrell.org.uk (David Cantrell) Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2017 17:04:33 +0000 Subject: [Ukfreebsd] Notes from last nights meeting In-Reply-To: <8EA3A06B-60AE-4B69-A97E-32CC4444D592@geeklan.co.uk> References: <22a208e1-035d-9281-cd88-3113c60a231c@geeklan.co.uk> <8EA3A06B-60AE-4B69-A97E-32CC4444D592@geeklan.co.uk> Message-ID: <20171130170432.GA6046@bytemark.barnyard.co.uk> On Wed, Nov 29, 2017 at 08:32:27PM +0000, Sevan Janiyan wrote: > > On 29 Nov 2017, at 11:56, Tony Finch wrote: > > AIUI he believes TDD is a panacea and that all other software reliability > > techniques are irrelevant. Not a very interesting person. > In the world of Ruby & Java, do you have any better options than unit tests? Unit tests != TDD, of course. The very first tool in my box for software reliability is a set of sensible coding standards that everyone on the team agrees to, including: Check your return values. Always. Test your errors as well as your successes Thou Shalt Not Use Any Construct That Smells Like Goto In particular switch/case/break is Right Out The second tool is test coverage measurement. Measure both that your tests cover all* your code, and that all the code in your tests gets run. * this is an aspiration that you will in practice rarely achieve, but merely knowing how uncovered your code is is jolly useful, and seeing how it changes over time is very useful indeed. The third tool is code review and continuous testing (ideally your test coverage measurement will go here). Sorry, that's all really boring stuff, nothing fancy like static analysis or funky type magic. Those certainly have their place, but if you have a choice of only one of fancy tools or boring procedures, you'll get more benefit from the boring procedures. -- David Cantrell | Official London Perl Mongers Bad Influence Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt