Summer of Code students for lowRISC

lowRISC was fortunate enough to be chosen as a mentoring organisation in this year’s Google Summer of Code. The Google Summer of Code program funds students to work on open source projects over the summer. We had 52 applications across the range of project ideas we’ve been advertising. As you can see from the range of project ideas, lowRISC is taking part as an umbrella organisation, working with a number of our friends in the wider open source software and hardware community. We were allocated three slots from Google, and given the volume of high quality applications making the selection was tremendously difficult. We have actually been able to fund an additional three applicants from other sources, but even then there were many promising projects we couldn’t support. We are extremely grateful to all the students who put so much time and effort in to their proposals, and to everyone who volunteered to mentor. The six ‘summer of code’ projects for lowRISC are:

  • An online Verilog IDE based on YosysJS. Baptiste Duprat mentored by Clifford Wolf

    • Baptiste will be working with an Emscripten-compiled version of the Yosys logic synthesis tool, building an online Verilog IDE on top of it which would be particularly suitable for training and teaching materials. A big chunk of the proposed work is related to visualisation of the generated logic. Improving the accessibility of hardware design is essential for growing the potential contributor base to open source hardware projects like lowRISC, and this is just the start of our efforts in that space.

  • Porting seL4 to RISC-V. Hesham ALMatary mentored by Stefan Wallentowitz

    • seL4 is a formally verified microkernel, which currently has ports for x86 and ARM. Hesham will be performing a complete port to RISC-V/lowRISC. Security and microkernels are of great interest to many in the community. It’s also a good opportunity to expand RISC-V platform support and to put the recently released RISC-V Privileged Architecture Specification through its paces. Hesham previously performed a port of RTEMS to OpenRISC.

  • Porting jor1k to RISC-V. Prannoy Pilligundla mentored by Sebastian Macke

    • jor1k is by far the fastest Javascript-based full system simulator. It also features a network device, filesystem support, and a framebuffer. Prannoy will be adding support for RISC-V and look at supporting some of the features we offer on lowRISC such as minion cores or tagged memory. This will be great not only as a demo, but also have practical uses in tutorial or educational material.

  • TCP offload to minion cores using rump kernels. Sebastian Wicki mentored by Justin Cormack

    • The intention here is to get a rump kernel (essentially a libified NetBSD) running bare-metal on a simple RISC-V system and evaluate exposing the TCP/IP stack for use by other cores. e.g. a TCP/IP offload engine running on a minion core. TCP offload is a good starting point, but of course the same concept could be applied elsewhere. For example, running a USB mass storage driver (and filesystem implementation) on a minion core and providing a simple high-level interface to the application cores.

  • Extend Tavor to support directed generation of assembly test cases. Yoann Blein mentored by Markus Zimmermann

    • Tavor is a sophisticated fuzzing tool implemented in Go. Yoann will be extending it to more readily support specifying instruction set features and generating a fuzzing suite targeting an ISA such as RISC-V. Yoann has some really interesting ideas on how to go about this, so I’m really interested in seeing where this on ends up.

  • Implement a Wishbone to TileLink bridge and extend TileLink documentation. Thomas Repetti mentored by Wei Song

    • Wishbone is the interconnect of choice for most existing open source IP cores, including most devices on opencores.org. The Berkeley Rocket RISC-V implementation uses their own ‘TileLink’ protocol (we provide a brief overview. By providing a reusable bridge, this project will allow the easy reuse of opencores devices and leverage the many man-years of effort that has already gone in to them.

The first 3 of the above projects are part of Google Summer of Code and the bottom 3 directly funded, operating over roughly the same timeline. We’re also going to be having two local students interning with us here at the University of Cambridge Computer Lab starting towards the end of June, so it’s going to be a busy and productive summer. It bears repeating just how much we appreciate the support of everyone involved so far - Google through their Summer of Code initiative, the students, and those who’ve offered to act as mentors. We’re very excited about these projects, so please join us in welcoming the students involved to our community. If you have any questions, suggestions, or guidance please do leave them in the comments.

Alex Bradbury