Riot: Tracker: Vega board porting

[Citrullin]

Porting status

Tasks:

• [ ] Build system config
  
  
  
  • [ ] Cortex-M4 core
  
  
  • [ ] Cortex-M0+ core
  
  
  • [ ] RI5CY core
  
  
  • [ ] ZERO-RISCY core
  
  
• [ ] linker scripts
  
  
  
  • [ ] CM4 memory region
  
  
  • [ ] CM0+ memory region
  
  
• [ ] flashing (openocd support?)
• [ ] boot single core
• [ ] gdb connection
• [ ] reusing kinetis periph drivers
• [ ] UART stdio
• new/unsupported modules:
  
  
  
  • [ ] SCG (clocking)
  
  
  • [ ] PCC (module clocks)
  
  
  • [ ] LPI2C
  
  
  • [ ] LPSPI
  
  
  • [ ] LPIT
  
  
  • [ ] TRNG (also found in kw41z)
  
  
  • [ ] SEMA42
  
  
  • [ ] MU
  
  
  • [ ] MMDVSQ
  
  
• [ ] Radio driver porting (kw41zrf should work with small changes #7107)
• [ ] multi core operation TBD
  
  
  
  • [ ] linking multi core binary for flashing
  
  

Where to find hardware

Now also available outside of the USA:
https://twitter.com/vegaboardriscv/status/1070765378064633856

The order form is available here:
US residents: https://open-isa.org/order/
Outside US: https://open-isa.org/order/outsideus/

Zephyr already supports RISC-V processors and even the vega board:
https://twitter.com/ZephyrIoT/status/1070393626709159942

And of course, I hope for an integration into RIOT, since I see a huge potential for RISC-V in the future :)

[gebart]

Interesting board.
It looks like #7107 might work with this SoC too. I hope I manage to get hold of one of these boards to do some experiments on.

[aabadie]

I hope I manage to get hold of one of these boards to do some experiments on.

+1 here. Looking at the specs, this board is a perfect candidate for joining the other boards in IoT-LAB (Saclay site)

[gebart]

@aabadie I was about to @ mention you to ask if you were going to have some of these in the room where all the mixed vendor boards are ;)

[dylad]

Wow free boards for real ? Seems really interesting to me !

[Josar]

seems to be updated now for outside US https://open-isa.org/order/outsideus/

[gebart]

I propose we update this issue into a tracker for the porting effort for the Vega board.

[Citrullin]

Maybe this PR is helpful for the implementation

[gebart]

I started outlining a few tasks for the Vega port in the top post

[gebart]

My approach to this will be to attempt to get the Cortex-M4 core to run RIOT first, since that should be very similar to simply adding one more Kinetis CPU variant. I believe this MCU may possibly be a close relative to the not yet released K32W0x with extra RISC-V cores.

[advancedwebdeveloper]

I have the evaluation board, too. I see that mingw examples is a nightmare - no support for Powershell. I wonder if MSVC's cross-compilation would allow to compile Cortex-M4 targeted examples.

[dylad]

@advancedwebdeveloper
For Windows, if you just want to cross-compile your examples maybe WSL or WSL2 is a good candidate. But I have no out of the box solution for the flashing part.

[advancedwebdeveloper]

@dylad , I am on Windows 10 32bit. I do have a Windows 10 64bit machine, nearby - but currently concentrating on 32bit OS.
And nobody answered about Microsoft's support for ARM compiler (MSVC's backend). I heard that it supports 64bit ARM (aarch64).
I thought I could rely more on Powershell scripts. Anyone interested to bootstrap that?
I have created a repo https://github.com/advancedwebdeveloper/rv32m1_sdk_riscv - need to change the license config. We could concentrate our efforts there

[dylad]

IIRC, you can setup custom toolchain in Visual Studio, so you can download the ARM toolchain for x86 (32bits) here and then setup your toolchain in your project configuration.
Regarding powershell scripts I cannot help you unfortunately.

[dylad]

(hit the wrong button sorry...)

[advancedwebdeveloper]

I suspect that SDKs for https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/embedded/jj919345%28v%3dwinembedded.80%29 and https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot could be able to offer compilers, for Cortex M4 processor of Vega board.