lowRISC project ideas for GSoC 2017

lowRISC is taking part in the 2017 Google Summer of Code as a mentoring organisation. See the full program timeline for a run-down of key dates. Student applications are due by 4pm UTC on April 3rd.

See the 2015 and 2016 ideas pages for more potential projects. If you want feedback on ideas, you’re best posting to the lowrisc-dev mailing list.

Project ideas (in no particular order)

Your project here

If you have a project idea relevant to lowRISC, don’t worry that it’s not listed here. For a good student with an interesting project we’ll almost definitely have an appropriate mentor. You are strongly recommended to get in touch either on the mailing list or directly to discuss the idea though. Some projects might be better handled under a different mentoring organisation, e.g. a PyPy port to RISC-V would make more sense under the Python Software Foundation.

Contributions to compiler testing

Summary: Improve the state of the art in RISC-V compiler testing.

LLVM compiler tests typically involve verifying certain instruction sequences are present in the output, i.e. don’t involve program execution. This has advantages, but it has the disadvantage of relying on test author writing the test correctly in the first place. A highly ambitious way of ensuring the generated RISC-V instructions correctly implement the semantics of the LLVM IR would be to perform an equivalence check where feasible. A more straight-forward approach might be to test the behaviour of the function both when interpreting LLVM IR and when executing the generated RISC-V code. There is also interesting work around testing ABI conformance, with the calling convention golden model being a first step towards this. We would be interested in extending this work.

Details:

Skill level: intermediate/advanced

Language: C++, Python

Mentor: Alex Bradbury asb@lowrisc.org

lowRISC/RISC-V in education

Summary: Produce a simulator tool with output useful for those learning computer architecture.

Tools like the MARS MIPS simulator are very popular for university-level education, giving the ability to experiment with simple assembly programs, single step, view register values and so on. This project would look at providing something with similar functionality for the RISC-V ecosystem. A potential extension would be to support features unique to lowRISC such as tagged memory. The RISC-V support in jor1k could be a starting point for a Javascript implementation of this idea.

Details:

Skill level: intermediate/advanced

Language: Javascript, language of your choice

Mentor: Alex Bradbury asb@lowrisc.org

“Simulated” memory controller

Summary: Provide a way to produce realistic performance numbers from FPGA.

It is a common pitfall to misinterpret or incorrectly scale performance numbers derived from benchmarks run on an FPGA-based SoC design. The problem is that your external memory interface is running at a very high speed compared to the core CPU (e.g. a 25MHz core clock speed but external memory running a several hundred MHz). This can be misleading when trying to consider what the performance would be on an ASIC, as the CPU clock speed could be many times higher but the memory frequency be the same or increase by a much smaller amount. The solution is to have a simulation-ready memory controller that will produce delays much closer to a system where the memory interface is running at a much slower speed.

Details:

Skill level: advanced

Language: SystemVerilog or Chisel

Programmable DMA engine

Summary: Implement a DMA engine using a small RISC-V core.

This project would involve looking at the feasibility of implementing a DMA engine that executes the RISC-V instruction set. What instruction set extensions would increase its efficiency and reduce overhead?

Details:

Skill level: advanced

Language: SystemVerilog or Chisel

Integrate more open-source IP for lowRISC on FPGAs

Summary: Introduce open-source IP for components such as UART, SPI, and the memory controller.

The current untethered lowRISC release makes use of Xilinx IP for its memory controller, SPI controller, and UART. Replacing these with open-source IP from OpenCores or elsewhere would allow customisation of the whole system, and may be a useful step towards supporting the untethered lowRISC design on Altera FPGAs. A useful starting point would likely be to study what IP is currently available and to assess its quality.

Links:

Details:

Skill level: intermediate/advanced

Language: Verilog/VHDL and Chisel

Mentor:

Building a Basic Embedded Security Module

Summary: Extend a basic microcontroller subsystems with security extensions.

We want to explore the applicability of a secure subsystem inside the lowRISC system-on-chip for security related tasks. The basic idea is to have a flexible playground for security research. For example this subsystem can be used to securely boot the system, remote attestation, or even to provide a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) to the user software.

For that subsystem we start with a simple 32-bit microcontroller with (at least) two privilege levels. The goal of this idea is to add one of the following:

Those are just the apparent ideas for a secure subsystem, we are open to your own ideas!

Details:

Skill level: intermediate/advanced

Language: (System) Verilog or Chisel, C

Mentor: Stefan Wallentowitz stefan@wallentowitz.de

Implement a SPIR-V front end for Nyuzi

Summary: Support the new SPIR-V intermediate language for the Nyuzi GPGPU.

SPIR-V is an intermediate language for parallel computation. Supporting SPIR-V on Nyuzi would allow a variety of parallel languages to target it. There is already an LLVM back-end for Nyuzi, so this task would consist of writing a front end that parses SPIR-V and converts it to the LLVM intermediate code form, using Nyuzi specific intrinsics for handling branch divergence.

Links:

Details:

Skill level: advanced

Language: C++

CMSIS-DSP on PULPino

Summary: Implement a subset of the ARM CMSIS DSP library on the Pulpino platform

Pulpino is an open-source design containing a 32-bit RISC-V implementation enhanced with DSP extensions. The ARM CMSIS DSP library is a set of common signal processing functions. The implementation will consist in selecting a reasonable subset of the library, implementing it on Pulpino, finely optimizing it to take advantage of PULP’s DSP extensions, and benchmarking it against an ARM implementation on a Cortex M4. This will help measuring the impact of the existing extensions and drive future extensions. The work could also be extended to the parallelization of this subset on the Pulp platform.

Links:

Details:

Skill level: intermediate

Language: C

Open SoC Debug: Nexus Trace Format

Trace debugging is the method to observe the execution of a system-on-chip. lowRISC is based on the Open SoC Debug project that creates open source building blocks for a debug infrastructure, with a strong focus on efficient trace debugging.

One of the main challenges is the transfer of trace events to the host. On the one for efficiency and on the other hand for compatibility.

The goal of this project is to adopt the Open SoC Debug infrastructure to packatize traces in the popular Nexus (IEEE 5001) format.

Skill Level: Intermediate

Language/Tools: SystemVerilog

Mentor: Stefan Wallentowitz

Open SoC Debug: Trace Visualization and Configuration

The Open SoC Debug project creates open source building blocks for a debug infrastructure, with a strong focus on efficient trace debugging. The lowRISC debug infrastructure builds on those. Currently we focus on the target (hardware) side of the infrastructure, but want to improve the host software, especially visualization of traces and configuration of the debug hardware.

In this project you should not reinvent the wheel, but build around existing infrastructure. For example the Open Trace Format 2 and the SCORE-P infrastructure are good starting points. For the visualization and interface building we suggest having a look at state of the visualization tools like ravel to integrate with or build a new framework for example on electron.

Skill Level: Beginner, Intermediate

Language/Tools: C++/Java/JS

Mentor: Philipp Wagner, Stefan Wallentowitz

Open SoC Debug: Trace Logging to Memory

In the lowRISC (which use Open SoC Debug) we currently transfer traces from the debug target to the host for on-line visualization or offline processing. But low level traces may be interesting even while the system-on-chip is in the field, similar to system traces, e.g. from Linux. The idea is to write the traces to a reserved space in the system memory and read them from the running software.

Basically this idea involves two hardware tasks: A configuration interface for trace logging and the interface between the debug interconnect and the system memory. Ideally your proof-of-concept includes a simple software. This setup can be optimized for example with trace compression and circular buffering.

Skill Level: Intermediate

Language/Tools: System Verilog

Mentor: Stefan Wallentowitz

Port lowRISC to LimeSDR

LimeSDR is a flexible software-defined radio platform that integrates an FPGA and a Lime Microsystems LMS7002 field-programmable RF frontend.

The idea of this project is to port lowRISC to the FPGA of the LimeSDR board. The major challenges are porting the most important I/O and memory interfaces and bringing up the communication to the signal processing blocks. If time permits, a simple wireless algorithm may be implemented on the lowRISC-limeSDR platform.

Skill level: Intermediate

Language/Tools: HDL, FPGA synthesis

Mentor: Andrew Back, Stefan Wallentowitz