Category: Uncategorized

CPUs

The CPU work is still coming but bootstrapping that stuff can get a little stressful between timing issues and mysterious “no output” scenarios etc. So that’s all coming, but it’s gonna be late.

Compilers

SecureLang® Pascal is becoming more robust, after some testing using it for GUI building I’ve been filling in missing logic operators and build options. I think it will become very stable.

This has basically overtaken my (unreleased) “flagship” compiler in features – it does most of the same stuff like generics & OOP but is a faster/simpler core product.

Kernel & OS

I’m fairly happy with my kernel code aside from needing some scheduler timing fixes & drivers, but the problem is it might not be ideal as a bootstrapping environment in all cases. So there will probably have to be some other kernel options.

The good news is that the Pascal compiler is now stable enough to start taking over the build tools, allowing for a more complex & reliable build system that can do things like choose different C compilers for different modules in an intelligent way. But that will still need a lot of work, so there might still be some intermediate OS builds before I start rebasing it around a new build system and new kernel options.

I’ve been trying to get medical help for years in Australia and I still don’t know if I’ve just got some leg injuries or something degenerative, or quite possibly both.

Don’t believe anything anyone says about there being free medical care here, people in my life normally die trying to get medical care from them.

So I think I’ll try to de-stress a bit and just upload some content while knocking out some short courses for a month or two, instead of trying to finish whole product ranges that I’ve been promising for years and am still behind on.

I still plan to release the operating system and some smaller/larger cores though, but I think returning to studying in the short term will help build business confidence.

https://www.techspot.com/news/113487-samsung-claude-code-can-cut-chip-design-work.html

Currently I’m working on getting a minimal PC style BIOS together and booting C code from my FPGA designs. This is separate to the customised C tool chain I use for 64-bit development, so I may release a fork of a legacy compiler (which is also a bit more complete than my own) to go with it.

Once this is complete I should be able to progress more rapidly with improved CPUs and then eventually with starting to port more of my operating system. The operating system won’t run on my current chipset though, I decided to moving to testing on smaller, 8-bit soft CPUs so I could ensure the base hardware & BIOS layers would be free from the pitfalls of larger CPUs.

This obviously doesn’t mean work on my 64-bit stack is obsolete or retired, just that I’ll finish some more basics before doing more work.

A NASA processor now being tested at JPL is performing 500 times faster than the radiation-hardened chips currently used in spaceflight — yet fits in the palm of a hand and could let future spacecraft make AI-powered decisions on their own when communicating with Earth can take 44 minutes round-trip.

I’ve crunched as many numbers as I can for now and it looks like full implementations of my larger CPU designs won’t fit on commodity FPGAs. Larger FPGAs will probably work for testing larger designs but those aren’t really practical for consumer FPGA-PC models.

Since the immediate goal is an operating system test rig, this probably means I’ll fall back to smaller and more well-proven/classic-style 32-bit designs.

Development of the larger CPU will remain active as I can probably continue with that on larger boards, it will just take a lower priority than getting a minimal working model out!

Every PC user today knows we kind of missed the peak, we didn’t appreciate what we had when computing could really be “personal”. The good news is there’s no longer a real technological moat around peak era PC technology, it’s relatively easy to build computers now (as can be seen from the amount of junk on the market). So today there are a lot of clones of old platforms, a few new ambitious platforms, but I’m not really seeing a lot in the middle that can replace legacy PC culture.

So, given that it’s really easy to get an ultra fast PC with all the latest AI stuff if you want that, and it’s really easy to get a clone of a vintage PC if you want that real retro experience, and given that these are widely available but often unaffordable or too risky of an investment, I think the gap in the market today might be for a “real” PC that actually lives up to the hype like “a computer all your own, controlled from your own home” and is a reliable recommendable product that won’t ruin your finances, career or hobby.

You are not alone. The current range of FPGA dev boards seem to be basically missing documentation and common sense. These things feel like they are designed by someone who hates beginners and is trying to gatekeep their own customer base. But if you just keep pushing, keep rebuilding in a different way when things break, I think it kind of works out eventually… I hope.

Reliable Releases

Binary releases will start once my hardware targets start to finalise. For each release there will probably be one CPU bitstream each for a couple of different FPGA developer boards, and probably one operating system SD image that should run on each different OS-capable configuration. Or otherwise maybe two OS builds, one with a simplified kernel.

Hardware Boards

These will start maybe around the end of the year, probably initially just as a test run to get some branded devices into existence. These will probably be similar to existing FPGA dev boards and probably based on existing open source designs, but will be customised for CPU+OS testing so should be a bit more usable like a mini PC out-of-the-box.

Graphics Demos

I’ve been promising graphics demos ever since finishing the kernel. The GUI kind of mostly works but won’t be able to be fully integrated with my hardware at this point.

So this means the full GUI system can be used for some tools on PC or for OS testing on commodity hardware but for real graphics demos showing my full stack I’ll have to go a little more retro for now (this might mean something like souped up VGA demos or something like a minimalist high-res GUI similar to legacy systems, but I won’t be able to do a full modern desktop with video/web/etc. running fully on my stack yet).

Actual Business Plan

Who knows?

I’ve been fucked around a lot the last couple of years so I’m currently stuck out of town with limited internet. This is okay for working on hardware and coordinating some business stuff, but I basically can’t offer services anymore as I just don’t have access to reliable services here. If the Australian housing crisis resolves itself any time in the near future then sure I hope to open a sprawling office in Sydney and take care of everybody’s shit for them so they can stop calling me lazy, otherwise I ain’t doing shit for people unless they provide accommodation/transport/snacks.

Assuming that I can get hardware in & out through the limited postal service though I can probably sell hardware devices and of course offer downloads online. So basically I’ll probably just aim to sell physical hardware.

Currently in testing is multi-core support (working in simple tests) and boot-from-SD (not verified yet, but doesn’t break the build). Graphics & PC style I/O should come later.

My first attempt at a real multi-core bus with shared memory failed and just produced an unworkable version of the design so for now I’ve dropped back to testing simpler multi-core interactions and this is mostly going smoothly (it’s just a bit hard to tell what will fit on FPGAs in a complete design with all I/O attached). If the current design is mostly being synthesised in my tests (and not mostly being optimised away by FPGA tools) then this means I should be able to deploy functioning multi-core systems on common FPGA sizes, but otherwise it just means multi-core will only work in simpler examples or on top of the line FPGAs (which would’ve been my initial expectation anyway).

My current limitation is basically just fiddly hardware, I’ve got some really reliable FPGA boards with currently limited I/O and some bigger boards which in theory have all the I/O for testing but are absolute pains in the arse to program such as the tools only working on legacy PCs. The upside of this is that trying different boards instead of having one perfect kit (if any exist) lets me get a broad idea of the market for FPGA developer products and the current state of the art.