GSoC2016 organisation collaboration? RTEMS on FPGA hardware running MiSoC

[Tim Ansell]

Hi RTEMS!

Firstly, congratulations on getting into Google Summer of Code 2016! My own
FOSS project TimVideos, was also accepted this year and was wondering if we
should be working closer together.

One of the "subprojects" of TimVideos is the HDMI2USB project which aims to
develop open source video capture hardware. We are doing this by using a
high speed FPGA running custom firmware using MiSoC (developed by the guys
who did the Milkymist One). This firmware embeds a soft-CPU (either a lm32
or a or1k) to allow us to write all the non-performance critical code in C.
At the moment we are developing code which just runs on the "bare metal"
but as the system gains more features we are increasingly needing the
features a "real" operating system would give us.

One project we would love to have a student work on, is porting RTEMS to
the MiSoC system and then recreating our current functionality on top of
it. However, this offers some challenges for us, as we are not really RTEMS
developers and don't really know the exact amount of work needed to do
this. Is anyone from RTEMS interested in helping mentor this project (or
similar projects)? Looking at what would need to be done for supporting
RTEMS on the MiSoC system and to replicated our current functionality I've
found the following;

  * It looks like RTEMS already has support for both the lm32 and or1k CPU
architectures (from looking at cpukit/score/cpu?). Is there a way to find
out the current "state" of these ports and how far along / what
functionality might be missing?

 * The "MilkyMist One" system (http://en.qi-hardware.com/wiki/Milkymist_One)
ran RTEMS on their gateware (which I think is where the lm32 port comes
from?). Their new MiSoC system shares a lot of similarities but is a
complete rewrite in their migen language. How would you go about testing
the existing RTEMS driver code and adapting it to the new MiSoC versions?

 * We recently launched our own open hardware (the Numato Opsis -
https://crowdsupply.com/numato-lab/opsis) but our firmware is yet to
support many of the features avaliable on the board. The two big ones are
the networking interface and the USB OTG interfaces. How would you go about
using RTEMS to help accelerate enabling those features? I assume providing
interfaces in the gateware which are similar to existing devices would make
things easier?

>From our side, we can definitely provide support around FPGA development
and even hardware for students to work on.

As well, if you get any students who are interested in open hardware, FPGA
development or video standards that aren't a good fit for an RTEMS project
- we would appreciate telling them to check us out! Thanks for your help
and looking forward to collaborating.

Tim 'mithro' Ansell
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