FOSS online development environment.

[Steve Hoover]

Hi All,

I was just pointed to the group and am catching up w/ the discussion.  Great to see the activity.  Happy to be a part of it.

With the group's goal of putting together a complete set of FOSS tools for chip design, why not plan to bundle it all up into an online environment?  I'm not an expert in this space, but it seems there is tons of activity lately making it easy to launch virtual desktops on demand and provide web access to them.  This would be a nice showcase of our work and a great no-setup path for students and tinkerers to try out the tools/flows and maybe even do real non-commercial design work.  It would be similar to EDAPlayground, but all FOSS, and running in a virtual desktop rather than through a custom client-side user-interface (to the server-side tools).  It would be something users could replicate in their own world once they are ready to do so.  Heck, there'd probably be enough interest in such a thing to draw some donations if we wanted to go there (not that I'm advocating it).  Once the framework is in place for folks to check out, I think it would draw a much broader user base and contributor base and gather real momentum to turn into an effort that would scare the pants off the Big 3.

If there isn't an expert among us, I would be willing to investigate.

Thoughts?

-Steve

[Bryan Murdock]

Welcome!  Do you mean like a virtualbox virtual machine?  Or a docker image?

Bryan

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[Steve Hoover]

I was thinking Docker, but I'd have to do some digging to understand the best way to kick off a user session and provide the remote desktop to it.

[Ouabache Designworks]

Yes !!! One of our biggest stumbling blocks is system administration. It's one thing to install a tool flow on your local box and something else completely  to remotely debug someone else box running whatever version of whatever operating system.

I have tried sites that let you run trials of real EDA tools but the only linux version supported is redhat.

Having an online site running a completely open sourced tool flow would be a great way to demo our work and show how useful open source can be.

There are a lot of sites that let you enter your design online but make it difficult for you to move it into your local environment. Some sites give you a rich library for you to use on their site but it's not available if you continue the design on your local box.

I would want a site where I could download designs from github.com, build simulate and debug them before saving the results back on github. I would want to be able to download all the tools and IP onto my local box and get the same results.


The problem is who is going to pay for and manage this? If you make it usable for engineers then you run the risk that spammers will get accounts to run their own spambots on our dime.

Working engineers won't touch anything  labeled "Non-Commercial use only" for fear that some sample design that they try out may one day be reused in a real design. Thats opens your company up to lawsuits.

This would be very useful if we can do it right.


John Eaton

 



 

[Steve Hoover]

Glad you see the value in it, John,  You make some good points.  To avoid the riff-raff, we'd probably need users to sign up and sign in, and there'd be some effort to monitor usage/mis-usage.  I agree that commercial users would steer clear.  I'm not sure whether you were suggesting that as a good thing or a problem.  It's just a fact of life I suppose.  We could put security measures in place, but that's a lot of work that no one would trust anyway.

I suggest that however this group move forward, its all about integration, and to do integration, we need a common environment we can all access.  This could be a giant git repo, but we can delay the pain of compatibility issues if we're running in the same environment.  So I'd say we try to put a common web-accessible environment together as a starting point.  We can worry about opening it up once we've got something to share.

So, first thing would be to figure out the right platform and host and the process for contributing to it.  One of the folks helping out w/ my business is looking into Docker and remote desktops, etc.  I'll see if I can pull him into the discussion.

-Steve

[Ouabache Designworks]

On Thursday, March 3, 2016 at 11:23:39 AM UTC-8, Steve Hoover wrote:

Glad you see the value in it, John,  You make some good points.  To avoid the riff-raff, we'd probably need users to sign up and sign in, and there'd be some effort to monitor usage/mis-usage.  I agree that commercial users would steer clear.  I'm not sure whether you were suggesting that as a good thing or a problem.  It's just a fact of life I suppose.  We could put security measures in place, but that's a lot of work that no one would trust anyway.

-Steve

I see it as a problem. We want in house IC design teams to be able to download our  stuff and use it on real chips. If it does the job then they will continue to use it. They will report bugs and feature requests and donate enhancements so that we create a better tool.

Think gnu tool chain for IC design.


John Eaton
 

[Steve Hoover]

Right.  Either way, we should make available a bundle that can be installed privately.  With a web environment, commercial folks can still learn the tools prior to installing them, just not with their proprietary content.