Are there any J-core systems I can buy that run linux

(or sh4 in general that might be capable of running the Openlane/Openroad tools

@User A few years back we pointed people at the mimas v2, but it was just a proof of concept. We're putting a new spartan 6 lx45 system up on crowd supply, hopefully by the end of this month?

(That's the "turtle" boards we mention on the site, although one of our investors hated that name and we're calling them the jx boards now. Raspberry PI 2b form factor, uses the pi 2/3 cases and has all the same I/O in the same places, just routed directly to the FPGA. Except the USB goes through a hub chip, and we have serial console on the usb power connector. :)

As for other sh4: yeah, several. I've got 2 different brands on the shelf here that run Linux. The easiest thing to do is email the debian sh maintainer and ask him, because he has systems set up with serial console and such already.

(He has these tiny blue ones he gits off of taiwan's version of ebay, they're sh4-based video on demand boxes that are cheap and powerful and can get a serial console. That's what the superh linux kernel maintainer uses to regression test with on real hardware.)

I note that QEMU's sh4 board is pretty straightforward to get running too. https://landley.net/toybox/faq.html#mkroot has instructions

You can also beat an sh4 system for qemu out of buildroot, I've done it before but forget how...

Ah, buildroot has a configs/qemu_sh4_r2d_defconfig file. If you know buildroot, last time I tried it that one "just worked"...

Debian superh is at https://wiki.debian.org/SH4 and I believe the debian superh maintainer I got the little blue box from is glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de

FYI the next time I talk to the people preparing the crowd supply campaign for the JX boards is wednesday evening (8pm eastern time). I'll try to get some sort of schedule from them, but schedules have been unusually flexible this year.

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I should track down the guy who did the video about the fully open bitstream generator toolchain and try to coordinate binary releases with him. (Or ask if there's an existing solution I missed...)

I would like to see debian packages for that

and if I could build a J-core system that can run Debian that will run the bitstream generator toolchain I have something I can probably come up with a way to fund my time to build/maintain/support debian binary packages of the whole thing

I'm working on a proper bash replacement shell in toybox, which works on nommu. In theory once that's in, you could do a musl-based nommu debian. (It's on my todo list.)

The other way forward is to use j32 and do a with-mmu j-core SOC, that should work with the existing sh4 packages.

(I believe j32 should run full compatible sh4 userspace, t's only the kernel parts that differ.)

We've been building the bitstream generator for x86-64 because that's what we have on our laptops, but I believe it should run natively on j32? I should try that...

(The xilinx and lattice binary only toolchains need to run on x86-64, so we've been testing the ghdl toolchain alongside that out of the same build directories. Regression testing and all that...)

Oh, status update on the turtle boards is that mailing hardware samples around is screwed up at the moment because of the attacks on the US postal system. Even mailing stuff from canada to japan is backed up right now, because everything transits USPS which is being actively sabotaged. Sigh...

So the people putting together the crowd supply page still haven't got the updated hardware samples to work with.

Our sysadmin re-uploaded the 2015 talk we gave, since the linux foundation accidentally deleted two entire years worth of ELC videos.

Yeah yeah, I need a better distribution mechanism: https://lists.j-core.org/pipermail/j-core/2020-August/000937.html

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Any activity on this for the shuttle slot?

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