A new teaching operating system using SiFive processor on a $129 board

[yunhao zhang]

Hello everyone,

My name is Yunhao and I am in charge of OS practicum at Cornell University. I have recently developed a new teaching OS using SiFive FE310 processor on a small board. It is now open-sourced on Github: https://github.com/yhzhang0128/egos-2000

We have purchased about 30 boards and plan to use them for our students this fall semester. Please feel free to take a look and play with it!

If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to contact me.

Cheers,

Yunhao

[Robert Lipe]

On Tuesday, April 26, 2022 at 9:30:41 AM UTC-5 zhan...@gmail.com wrote:

We have purchased about 30 [ Arty A7 ] boards and plan to use them for our students this fall semester. Please feel free to take a look and play with it!

If you're doing OS work and not FPGA work, could you save money by using the same CPU core and (I think) SoC in other FE310 products like:
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/15594 or hte eUSB-C version 
https://www.amazon.com/SparkFun-Plus-SiFive-development-architecture-microcontroller/dp/B081YKZMH4

If you wanted to get the cost down even more and were willing to touch up base drivers and boot, but still stay with units with VM, you can find boards about half the price again, there are a few D1 boards that offer supervisor/machine/user mode.
Sipeed Lichee RV is like $16USD  with a $5-$10 dock.Some models have screens on front or back. Big brother RV-86 has about a 3" screen.
MangoPi Pro may be shipping. It's hard to tell with them.
K210 is older (about the same era as the Fe310) and it's "only" 8MB, not 64-512 like the two above, but there are a bunch of designs with them.

These all cable to a laptop and are very portable, just like in your picture.

I get that cost may not be your primary factor, but if your students aren't going on to do FPGA programming, there are newer and less expensive options out there. (And more to come soon...) Actually, from what I see in the code, *mmu.c is about the only code stopping this from running on about any $5 RISC-V microcontroller if your students want to go "off the ranch" and port Earth to a $8 ESP32-C3 Stack, Bouffalo EVB1, or Sipeed Longnan Nano. Might be fun side projects. (Since it seems to be running identity mapped, *mmu.c isn't really doing any VM action to speak of anyway, is it?)

Thanks for sharing your project. It looks very cool. No PDP7 required. :-)
RJL

[Brandon Cheo Fusi]

Hi everyone,

A port to the D1 chip is now available at https://github.com/cheofusi/egos-2000-d1

Brandon